I’m a little bit horrified that I’m already writing my second Christmas soap recipe of the year, but that is the way of soap. It must age, and it would be a bit rude of me to publish this recipe too close to Christmas for anybody else to make it. So I’m writing about Christmas soap well over a month before Christmas—which, of course, means I initially made this soap before Canadian Thanksgiving. Yipes. Where is the year going?

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Anyhow, I digress. I just loved the idea of a candy cane soap for Christmas this year. Something crisp and bright, with a mellowing note of vanilla, and fun swirls of red, green, and white. So perfect for Christmas that it’s pretty much cliché. A delicious, minty cliché.

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This is why you need an immersion blender for this soap.

This is why you need an immersion blender for this soap.

For this soap, an immersion blender is mandatory to get nice, smooth colour—otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of lumps of the oxides through the soap, which rather ruins the effect. If you’re anything like me, you’ll love watching the clumps get blasted into smooth, creamy oblivion. Muahahahaha.

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Candy Cane Christmas Soap

40% olive oil (pomace) (USA / Canada)
25% refined coconut oil (USA / Canada)
20% lard or beef tallow
10% avocado oil
5% castor oil (USA / Canada)

Calculate to a 6% superfat

Per 500g (1.1lbs) oils:

Follow standard soap making procedure. When you reach a moderately thick trace (think unwhipped heavy cream), add the essential oils, and use the immersion blender to blend in the white kaolin clay (USA / Canada) and titanium dioxide. The immersion blender is not optional for this recipe unless you want little blobs of the oxides and titanium oxide suspended in your soap.

Pour one third of the soap into another bowl and blend in the red iron oxide. Pour this soap into the prepared mold.

Pour another third of the soap (that is still white at this point) into the mold over the red soap.

Blend the green chromium oxide into the remaining third of the soap and pour that into the mold.

If you want to get fancy, you can also add a bit of French Green clay to the green part, and some Australian red reef clay to the red part. I did this, but left it out of the recipe since it didn’t really make that big of a difference in the final product and requires more ingredients.

Swirl the layers together if needed (if your trace was thin enough they will have swirled themselves).

Let saponify for 24 hours, slice, and let age at least 3 weeks.

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