Candy Cane Taiwan Swirl

Happy holidays, everyone!

I hope you all are gearing up for a wonderful time with your loved ones. My husband and I are going home to Florida for Christmas and we're looking forward to spending time with family and friends. I am especially looking forward to being declared the loser of our annual Goofy Golf putt-putt game. It's tradition.

It's also tradition for me to give family and friends the gift of soap whether they want it or not. Just kidding, they all want it. Who wouldn't?

And it just wouldn't be the holidays without peppermint and candy canes.

I usually make a candy cane soap every year, and I try to come up with a different way to do it each time, too. This year, I decided to try the Taiwan Swirl.  You may remember that I attempted a Taiwan swirled candy cane soap last year and things didn't quite work out. But this year things went more according to plan.

For starters, my recipe behaved this time. I used the same recipe that I used for my Pumpkin Gingerbread Vertical Swirl: 50% olive oil, 30% coconut oil, 15% avocado oil, and 5% castor oil with a 5% superfat factored in. Both times I have used this recipe, it traced slowly for me. I had been having difficulty finding a palm-free recipe that creates a loose, thin trace, which is what is needed for something like the Taiwan Swirl. In fact, I had to stickblend the soap batter for quite a while to get to a light trace. I have been trying for months to rid myself of my tendency to overmix, so it feels strange to stickblend and stickblend and stickblend ... and stickblend some more.

The downside of this recipe is that it makes quite a soft soap initially. It needs to hang out in the mold for a little extra time. Even then, I think I may make it a habit to put my mold in the freezer for a few hours before unmolding when using this recipe to ensure a clean removal. Looking back, I was probably very lucky that the soap didn't tear when I unmolded it.

For the liquid, I swapped coconut milk for the water just because I had several baggies of it in my freezer and thought that it would be a nice addition. I cook with coconut milk frequently and often have some left over from a recipe. So I just measure it out, pour it in a baggie, write the weight on the bag, and put it in the freezer. If I don't use the leftover in a future culinary adventure, it goes into a batch of soap.

It's good to freeze milks anyway before using them in soap because if the milk gets too hot it can scorch. When you add the lye, it will melt the frozen milk. I also stir the lye solution in an ice bath to keep the temps as low as possible.

My fragrance cabinet is running low on holiday scents, but I did have some peppermint and spearmint essential oils. Yay, since I wanted to make a candy cane soap.

For the colorants, I opted for titanium dioxide, Merlot Sparkle mica, and Hydrated Chrome Green pigment mixed with a bit of oil pulled from the total to work out the clumps.

To do the Taiwan Swirl, I had the help of some awesome dividers from Great Soap Shop on Etsy. These dividers fit the RED Essential Depot silicone mold, but Great Soap Shop also offers similar dividers that fit the Crafter's Choice 1501, Bramble Berry 10" silicone molds, and American Soap Supply Tall & Skinny molds. (RED stands for "Revolutionary Essential Depot," if you were wondering.)

Here is a video showing what I did:


I mixed my essential oils into my soapmaking oils and then added the coconut milk/lye solution. I brought the soap to a light trace. Then I split my batch into four portions.

Because I am dreadful at eyeballing things, I broke out the calculator to help me figure out how much soap I needed for each cavity of my divider. A nice feature of SoapCalc is that it will estimate your soap's total weight. For this batch, my total weight was approximately 1,980 grams. So I divided that number by four to get 495g, which is how much I would need for each cavity. I wanted to do a white-red-green-white pattern, so I figured I needed 495g of red, 495g of green, and the rest could be white.

I pressed down on the dividers as I poured the soap so that it wouldn't leak over onto the other side. It's probably best to have a buddy simultaneously pour two colors while you pour the other two to keep the soap from leaking underneath the dividers. I was alone, though, so I pressed down as I poured some white into one cavity, then some red into another, some green into another, and more white in another. I did pretty well with minimal leaking, and once I had some soap in each cavity the soap didn't migrate anymore.

Once I had poured all of my soap, I carefully pulled the dividers straight up and out. There was soap still clinging to the dividers, so I grabbed a silicone mold with individual cavities and scraped the soap into it.

To do the swirl, I stuck a candy thermometer (a chopstick or something similar would also work) to the bottom of the mold and made a tight S-pattern vertically through the soap. Then I made a similar pattern through the soap horizontally as well.

The cut for the Taiwan Swirl is a little different than what I normally do for a loaf soap. Instead of cutting the bars every inch or so, I cut the soap into roughly two-and-half-inch blocks and then cut those blocks in half horizontally. (The cutting starts at about the 11:55 point in the video above if you want to skip to it to see what I mean.)  The swirls run through the entire loaf, so by cutting horizontally, the swirls will cover more of each soap bar's surface. I used a finished bar from another batch to help me determine where to cut.

The top of my soap loaf had a bit of soda ash, but I steamed it away.

I really love these bars, and I think my family and friends will, too! And I am so thrilled that I FINALLY managed to achieve a trace light enough to allow me to swirl.

What are your plans for the holidays? I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year!

Candy Cane Impressionist Swirl Soap

I'm a big fan of anything minty. And at Christmastime, mint shows up everywhere. It's fitting for the season - it's tingly and invigorating, but it also warms you on a cold day. Mint is not just for the winter holidays, though. It's a perennial favorite anytime of year. A bar of peppermint soap on a hot summer day is perfectly refreshing. (Crafty one, that mint. Like a Thermos. How does it know when to be cool and when to be warm?)

And if you pair mint with chocolate, it's even better. But then, chocolate always makes things better.

And so every Christmas, I must have not only minty foodstuffs, but also minty soap. And that means candy cane soap.

Christmas + Mint = Candy Canes

Candy canes are The Christmas Candy. When I was a kid, I'd go to the mall to see Santa Claus and tell him what I wanted for Christmas. I wasn't sure that I believed in the whole Santa thing - how's one guy going to deliver all of those presents to all of those kids in one night? - but I figured that it couldn't hurt to hedge my bets. And after I gave Santa my list of demands, he'd give me a candy cane.

Also, when I was little, my grandma would hang candy canes on the Christmas tree and my cousin and I would eat them on Christmas Eve as we not-so-patiently waited until it was time to open presents. The adults would play spades while we consumed an obscene amount of pepperminty sugar and inspected our gifts over and over again. The spades game was over once a team scored 500,000 bazillion points and only then were we allowed to open presents.

I don't visit Santa Claus anymore (I guess he just refers to my Amazon wish list these days), and my cousin and I no longer gorge on candy canes on Christmas Eve. But we still need a candy cane theme for the holidays, and soap is the perfect medium.

For this project, I decided to give the Impressionist Swirl a try. This technique uses squeeze bottles to squirt the soap into the mold in alternating colors, creating a swirl that resembles the short brushstrokes of the Impressionist artists from the 19th century.

Candy Cane Impressionist Swirl Soap

It's important to choose a well-behaved recipe and fragrance oil when using this technique. You want a thin trace, and it is necessary for the soap to remain liquid throughout the process.

For the scent, I chose Nature's Garden's Peppermint fragrance oil, which soaped like a dream. I mixed the FO into my cooled oils and then added the lye solution. Once I reached a light trace, I divided the soap batter into three equal portions and colored one with titanium dioxide, another with Bramble Berry's brick red oxide, and another with BB's green chrome oxide. (I mixed each colorant with a bit of liquid glycerin to work out the clumps and help minimize streaking.)

I transferred the colored soaps into three separate squeeze bottles and then squirted the colors into the mold horizontally in a S-shaped pattern, alternating between the white, green, and red. I repeated that process until the soap was gone. (I turned the mold every so often to keep the sides even, as the Soap Queen tutorial above recommends.) Once the soap was all used up, I used a skewer to swirl just the very top layer.

Here's a video I made of the process:


These soaps turned out really cool! I really enjoyed this technique, and I will have to revisit it in the future. I love how each bar is unique, and how you don't know what you're getting until you cut into the soap loaf.

Are you a big mint fan? Which scents and flavors do you associate with the holidays?

Peppermint Funnel Swirl

Peppermint is synonymous with winter and the holiday season for me. When I was a kid, my grandmother would hang candy canes on the Christmas tree. My cousin and I would scope out all of the gifts under the tree, always with candy canes hanging out of our mouths.

Another memory: When we lived near Clearwater, FL, my parents and I went to the town's Christmas parade one fiercely cold Saturday morning. We must have looked particularly miserable standing around in the freezing temperature, waiting for the parade to start, because a policeman on a motorcycle stopped and gave us a handful of round Starlight mints, saying that the peppermint would warm us up.

Both of these strong childhood memories have things in common: cold weather, Christmas, and peppermint. Nowadays, Christmas has to include not only ginger cookies but also something peppermint-y. Sometimes I make peppermint bark, peppermint cookies, peppermint cake, or peppermint brownies. I'm happy with any dessert-based medium as long as it includes peppermint.

Don't get me wrong - peppermint is also a perennial favorite. I will love peppermint anytime you put it in front of me, whether it's December or June. Peppermint is warm and soothing in the winter, and brisk and refreshing in the summer. And it's pretty darn good in the spring and autumn, too.

I love desserts and I love soap. And the two intersect quite a lot for me during the holidays. Such is the case with peppermint. No Christmas is complete without peppermint baked goods and peppermint soap.

For my peppermint soap, I wanted to do a variation of the funnel swirl. I thought it would be fun to do the funnel swirl in a round mold, so I tried out my new column mold from Bramble Berry for the first time. This mold comes with a custom liner so that unmolding the soap is a breeze. (I got my inspiration from Bramble Berry's Anne-Marie, who did a twist on the faux funnel pour technique to make her Circle Swirled Soap with the column mold.)

Wrong.

NOTE: If you purchase this mold, please do yourself a favor and read Bramble Berry's helpful usage tips near the end of the product description. I am embarrassed to admit that I dorked things up the first time I used the mold. Evidently, I had the liner in backwards - the edges overlapped (so I taped them together), and my liner ended up being too short for the mold (something I somehow paid attention to only after making the soap). I know, I know. You would think that either one of those things would have been a clue that I was doing something wrong. What can I say? My brain don't work too good sometimes, and Scooby-Doo isn't always around when you need him. I went back and looked at BB's description and noticed a new tip saying that the edges of the liner shouldn't overlap - if they do, flip the liner around. So I flipped it around the other way, and now the edges meet to make a perfect circle inside of the mold, and the liner sticks up out of the top a bit now. So, there is no need for tape nor is it possible to overshoot the top if the liner is placed correctly. I like to think that I would have eventually figured this out on my own, but who knows? My face is very red as I type this, but I share this with you so that you don't make the same mistake. (And also because you'll watch the video below and think, "What's the deal with the liner?") The good news is that my soap still turned out fine. But next time will be even better! Now that I know how to properly use the liner, I see myself falling in love with this mold. (Brain, you're on notice. Seriously, get it together.)

Despite having a malfunctioning noggin, I somehow managed to properly place my funnel over the top of the mold and actually make soap. (I did forget to add my sodium lactate, though, so my soap was a bit sticky. Strike two, brain.) After I made my main batch of soap - scented with Bramble Berry's Peppermint essential oil - I split the batch into three equal portions and colored one portion with brick red oxide, another with Merlot Sparkle mica, and another with titanium dioxide. Then I poured each color for a count of three through the funnel - alternating between red, white, and pink - until the soap was gone.

Here is a video I made of the process:


This pour produces bars with pretty rings of color emanating from the center, almost like a cut tree trunk. I like that no two bars look exactly the same.

Since this is my first go at round soaps, this is also my first time packaging round soaps. My bars are usually rectangular, and I just put a cigar band label around them. Cigar bands don't work so well with round soaps, so I needed to come up with something else. I had heard of soapmakers using coffee filters to wrap their round soaps in, so I gave that a shot. It worked beautifully.

Using coffee filters to package round soaps

I used regular 8-12 cup filters, and they fit around the soap perfectly. I chose white, but you could also go with the brown filters for a more earthy look.

Wrapping round bars with coffee filters is very easy: Place the soap in the middle of the filter. Pull the edge of the filter close to the bar and fold it toward the center. Keep folding the edges in, working all the way around the soap and keeping the folds taut. Once you get all of the edges folded in, secure the center with a piece of tape and carefully place your label.

I picked up some 2.5" round white labels, which also fit the soaps perfectly. (I've seen the labels in the clear and brown kraft variety, too.) I used two labels per bar, but you may be able to get all of your info on one.

I am very pleased with my Peppermint bars, and I think the packaging is cute. These will make great Christmas gifts!

How many of you are peppermint fans? What sorts of peppermint goodies (soap or otherwise) are you planning on enjoying this holiday season?

Another note: I am publishing this blog post a bit early this time because I am heading out of town for a little while. I'm not sure what kind of internet connection I'll have while I'm gone, so I may be away from Blogland for a few days. I will do my best to respond to all of your lovely comments promptly, but if I am slower than usual checking in, that's why. Thanks so much for reading, and I will pop in as often as I can during the next week and a half!