Happy mistakes

One of the Christmas soaps this year had a different look, quite by mistake.  Vanilla for scent and charcoal for the colour, just like the black special blend, but this one has no frou frou look about it.

For some reason the soap didn't mix all that well.  I didn't notice that anything was different until a few days after I cut it and the colour started to develop.  The look was just like Granite rock.  So that was the name it got.

The scent is only vanilla and it smells sweet and innocent, although it looks rather wicked.  I made another batch, to try and duplicate it, but that ended up in a very badly lined soap form so I couldn't get it out.  It was just stuck in there and I had to spoon it out.  It was still quite soft so I thought I'd make small balls out of it to use as decoration or something.  The balls didn't want to form nicely so I ended up with really uneven looking balls.  The next day when I took a second look I realized that they looked just like pebbles on a beach (yes, the beaches here are black, sand and rocks.  White beaches are just an exotic foreign thing to me).

But this mistake again turned out great, because I've had two people enthuse about my pebbles already.  Funnily enough, both have a hard time saying nice things about my flower decorated soaps.  It's funny how tastes are different, but I can quite see the appeal of the rock look.  So I'm going to polish them a bit once they are properly hard and put a few into a bag or on a dish and present them to their admirers for Christmas.

This recipe is a very basic one.

Olive oil      40%   - 280g / 10oz
Coconut oil     35%  - 245g / 8.6oz
Rapeseed oil     15%  - 105g / 3.7oz
Soybean oil     10%  - 70g / 2.5oz

Medical charcoal for colour, vanilla for scent and sugar crystals for a touch of glamour.  I love it when something that seems to be a failure turns out to be something that I would never have thought of doing myself.