Have you been to Holly’s blog, Sparklebrook?  If not… head on over there and check out her beautiful soap.  The other day she posted a Carrots and Cream soap.  Drool.  I make a soap with carrot baby food and half and half cream.  I haven’t made it in awhile but was inspired to do so after seeing hers.  I think this will be just what my dry winter skin needs.

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Creamy carrot soap

Avocado oil – 2 oz
Castor oil – 2 oz
Shea butter – 4 oz
Coconut oil – 6 oz
Olive oil – 6 oz
Lard – 8 oz (sub with palm if you want but run through a lye calc)

Cream (half and half) – 6 oz
Sodium hydroxide – 3.7 oz
Sodium lactate – 1 oz

Carrot baby food – 2.5 oz jar (make sure the ingredients say carrots and water only)

I scented this one with an essential oil blend of lavender, lemongrass and cedarwood.  (8:2:1)

The first step when using cream or milk for soap making is to freeze the milk.  I simply pour mine in an ice tray.

Then measure out what you need.  I used 6 oz.

You can add the carrots to this or you can add at trace.  I’m going to go ahead and the carrots to the cream.

Slowly sprinkle in the lye as you stir…stir…stir.  Milk likes to heat up but since we froze it first…it doesn’t get too hot and burn.

It felt like it was heating up more than I wanted so I took it over to the sink and ran some cold water over the container as I stirred.

While that’s cooling down, measure out your solid oils.

And melt down.

Add the liquid oils to the melted oils.

Once the oil mixture and lye water have both cooled down to where they are warm to the touch, we’re ready to make soap.  If you’re using sodium lactate add it to the lye water.

Pour the lye solution into your oils and stickblend until trace.  Since we’re not doing a fancy design or anything you can mix to a nice thick trace.

Pour it into the mold.

I like to gel my soap (yes, even milk/cream soap) so I covered with a piece of seran wrap and piece of wood.  Milk/cream soap does tend to heat up so if you do insulate to gel be sure you check on it quite often.  You might find that you don’t even need to insulate it to get gel.  It’s a bit cold here, so I find that I usually do.  I checked on it after about 20 minutes and you can see it started getting a bit too hot.  Notice the crack?  So I uncovered it and let it finish gelling without all of the insulation.

Thanks, Holly for the inspiration!

Amanda