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So my Chocolate Strawberry Soap finally got used today and it’s amazing! There is actually a faint strawberry scent and a rich chocolate scent. The strawberry smell surprised me actually!
In case someone is thinking about making a strawberry purée soap, my suggestion, send the purée through a fine mesh sieve. The strawberry seeds are a nice little exfoilator but ruin the overal look of the soap.
Sarah, your soap was beautiful! How did you find it worked?
I need to make this. Good point to strain the strawberry purée if you don’t want exfoliation. I usually don’t like it in soaps. I need to add strawberries to the grocery list.
Awesome! That would be pretty in yellow and pink or orange swirls! Or layered with orange, yellow, then white. Wait, that sounds like candy corn. Scratch that! Maybe, orange, yellow, and pink layers or orange, yellow and green. Now I want to make soap!!
My “plan” (you know how it is with soaping), is to do the majority of the soap in yellow, then have a hot pink swirl up top, and a vibrant green swirl down low. I’m going to make it with mango purée, lard, tallow, olive, coconut, shea butter, rice bran and castor and a wee bit of kaolin.
My Extracts dealer is sending me some mango extract, and if it’s not too colourful, hoping to add some in too. I was thinking of mango butter, but that stuff is just way too pricey to out in soap. I’ll probably make a complementing body butter with it as the star of the show.
That sounds like it will be very pretty!!
Mango sounds YUM in soap. I don’t know why, but fruit in soap always sounds good to me. I got my strawberries today, so I need to purée them and get them in the freezer so they’re ready when I am! Chocolate strawberry soap! I’ll love it, my husband will probably hate it! Haha
Strain them first! Or strain, dry the seeds then put them through the coffee grinder.
For the cocoa powder, one of the soaping groups I belong to, a lady did a soap expirment with cocoa. She whipped up a batch of soap, divided it all up and used different types of cocoa powder. She found that the European brands seems to give a better colour and scent. I used a cocoa powder from Switzerland, and added in some dark brown and a wee bit of redoxides to give me a richer colour. So when you whip it up? Make sure you’ve got some oxides near by just in case!
Are you thinking of using all the liquid as purée?
I honestly don’t know. I got 2 lbs. fresh strawberries and I’m going to run them through my Vitamix. I may not need to strain after it goes through that. At that point, I will see how much liquid I have with the purée and go from there. If I’m short, I’ll just make up the difference in water, I think. Geez! Hadn’t even thought about the chocolate part. I have a large container of cocoa powder here that is used for cooking. I figured I’d use that. No use in buying something expensive and fancy, just in case I crash and burn with this! Haha!
See, I’m figuring it out as I talk to you! I will have oxides at the ready for altering color, if necessary. I watched Marie’s video for her chocolate soap, and the color of her soap was not appealing at all when she first mixed it. It looked like baby poop!!
Youre not going to crash and burn. You’re going to do it and go wow wee! I did it let’s do it again!
Pssst: try cucumber purée with French green clay. But peel a dozen or so cucumbers, dry out the peels, crush them down to a powder and add in at trace. Awesome soap!
I’ve done a cucumber purée, peels and all, unstrained and partial replacement of water in recipe. That was a nice soap! I still have one bar left and it’s hoarded away. I will be sad to see it go when I finally use it! Haha
I am going to try it your way. Total replacement of water in recipe? I never would have thought of doing that with the peels. That just sounds like too much trouble! Wouldn’t it be the same if you just blitzed it all in a blender/food processor and used the whole thin as the liquid in a recipe? Or does the peel have some extra benefits done this way? Does it add a green color to the French green clay in the soap?
When I did my cucumber soap, I remember the peels in it speckled the soap, looked pretty and green, then, as it aged they turned brown then disappeared completely.
I did both in the past to compare. 1) Just tossed everything in. 2) peeled some cuc’s dried the peels. Then had even more cucumbers puréed down so a double whammy of peels.
The first one, same as you. The peels disappeared on me over time.
The second go, the dried peels hung around and are still hanging around years and years later. Which is what I wanted them to do. And, cucumber peels are said to have higher astringent properties than the flesh so great for problematic skin. The French green clay I used to colour the soap a cucumbery green. I didn’t take pictures back then of my soaping as camera phones could only have a few photos on them at a time, so I don’t quite remember how the dried peels helped or didn’t help the colour.
But, I can tell you looking at my soaping notes from the time, this recipe is where I not quite perfected my trick to not scorching my purées. So used the French green clay to cover up the scorching.
It still sounds like a nice soap! I will have to try that at some point. I want to make more cucumber soap, more oat milk soap, and more soap! More, more, more! I want to practice and get better at design techniques too. YouTubers make it look so easy and flow so nicely. I feel a bit stressed, hoping I’m doing it right!
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