Bombs away! - Happy New Year :D

The little hens were a present from my daughter. She found
them in the Good S. but they are more my thing. The
heartshaped candle holders are Danish and were still in
the box. I like this type of simple Christmas decoration.

I finally made bath bombs.  I've wanted to do them for the longest time, but somehow it seemed too complicated.  It isn't.  It's really easy.  In fact it's almost too easy.  I used a very simple recipe from The Excellent Living Guide.  There are many guides and tutorials on the Internet and most of them are good.  Now I am not the greatest bath bomb fan, but my sisters really like them, so I thought I'd have a go at making them as presents.

I had managed to get myself some Citric acid and I found that to be the hardest part of the whole thing.  I am now the proud owner of 25 kilos of the stuff, so I can make them for years to come.  The most wonderful thing about the bath bombs is that they don't swallow up all my EO's.  The recipe that I used is:
1 cup Citric acid
2 cups Baking soda
2 tsp. oil (like Olive or Grapeseed)
1 tsp. EO

The real trick to this is to blend the oils with the dry ingredients and then have some water in a spray bottle and carefully spray a bit of water and stir well with a wire whisk.  It doesn't take much to moisten the mixture enough to be able to make the bombs.  And that is fairly easy.  Just scoop a lot of mixture into both parts of the mold, squeeze together very hard and gently release the bomb from the mold.  Tapping the mold can help with this.  Let dry for about a day.  Store in a dry place and use.  I read that they don't keep very well.

Now I have one of those plastic Christmas ornament types that I've seen used as a mold and I tried that.  I didn't like it.  Firstly it makes a very large bath bomb.  Some may like that, but I don't.  So I came up with using some plastic packaging from a type of coffee.  I don't use it myself (strictly Nescafé in this household) but my cousin has been collecting these as small soap molds, for which they also work well.  The resulting bombs are smaller than those traditional ones and they look a lot like the French Macarones that I like so much.

From this recipe I can make 8-9 bombs of that size.  I made a few batches, one with Lemongras and Annatto infused oil, one with Lavender and Alkanet infused oil, one with uncoloured oil and Peppermint EO.  The fourth was my failure, it had Palmarosa EO and a mix of Annatto and Njoli oil.  The mixture was a bit too wet, so that the bombs had sort of semi-fizzed after a day.  I haven't tried them in the bath yet, I think they'll work for me at home, but they are not pretty.

I threw in a bit of corn starch, maybe half a cup, into one recipe.  It can apparently aggravate yeast infections, so beware of that.  I have also read that milk powder can be used and I have that somewhere so I may try it one of these days.  In another batch I used about the same amount of Epsom salt which is good for sore muscles.

Those candleholders are very typically Danish and
are most likely from the 40's or 50's judging from
the box. I don't dare to have living lights on the tree
so I decided to hang them up on a thin wire circle and
hang them in the window. 

I thought it appropriate to end this year with a bang.  We do that here in this country.  On New Years Eve the population goes completely insane.  Everyone can buy fireworks and almost everyone does.  There are  several tons of fireworks fired up around midnight.  The noise is unbelievable, there are fireworks absolutely everywhere and finally a thick smoke envelops the city.  We have a fantastic view over the city, so we prefer to participate in the madness only as spectators with our closest relatives.

I wish everyone a happy New Year.  I am thankful for the year that is almost at an end and I thank you all for a most wonderful year of getting to know you, so many people all over the world who share an interest in making soaps.
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