Candy Cane Christmas Soap
40% olive oil
25% coconut oil
20% lard
10% avocado oil
5% castor oil
6% superfat
Per 500g oils:
- 23g peppermint essential oil
- 8g bezoin or vanilla essential oil
- 1 tbsp kaolin clay
- 1 tbsp oil soluble titanium dioxide
- 1–2 tsp red oxide
- 1–2 tsp green oxide
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 kaolin clay 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 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 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.
