Friday, May 15, 2015

Great Cake Soapworks May 2015 Soap Challenge: Mini Dessert Soaps.

I entered the soap challenge again. I was going to enter the April one as well but I missed the deadline. It was probably just as well, April was a sad month for my husband. He lost both his mother and his aunt within a week of the other. It has been a bit difficult.

Anyhow, I was excited to see what this month's challenge would be. When I started making soap, my very second soap was a brownie soap. I didn't have any other scent other than vanilla and I colored it with cocoa powder. He said I was evil and asked that I not make soap that looked or smelled like food. So I was happy to be part of this challenge just to needle my husband. Really, it was quite nice of him to think so well of my efforts in soap making. I didn't feel like it was realistic, but he must have.

The ideas were pouring through my head and it was difficult to pin just four down. I enjoy these challenges because there is a goal to achieve in your very own way. I find it funny how goals can boost creativity rather than suppress them. I wanted to play with that fondant soap, so I made some immediately. I used to play with polymer clay,so I thought I could sculpt something cute. I knew I wanted to make a parfait as an homage to my days working at Dairy Queen. The rest was still very much up in the air.

So here is what I am going to enter: a Orange Strawberry Parfait, a Gingerbread House with Gingerbread Maude (she just feels like a Maude to me), a dressed up Brownie Bite, and a mini Strawberry Swirl cake with glazed strawberry topper. All the cold process soap has goat milk and the brown soap has cocoa powder. The seeds are blueberry.


I originally had a chocolate fudge parfait, but well, it looked melted. And my cherry was ugly and I didn't wait long enough to add the silly thing. As you can see, my fragrance didn't give my anytime before bleeding into the unscented soap. I was going for a bit of a messy parfait since I know from making them, they don't look picture perfect. Often one machine was not freezing as nicely as it was supposed to. But well, I wasn't really happy with the chocolate fudge one, so I decided to make another kind.



Strawberry was on my mind. I decided to make a Strawberry Swirl Cake with my round embed mold from Brambleberry. I had made mini strawberries with the fondant soap, so I was just going to add a Strawberry Parfait. I used some melt and pour soap to make my strawberry sauce.


All I had to do was to roughly chop it into little chunks. I didn't have any strawberry seeds, so those are blueberry seeds you see there in the picture. (My youngest son, Lil' Duder, thought it was watermelon soap.) So all I had to do was add the strawberry chunks and drizzle with some more melt and pour colored with mica. (Full disclosure: I used a red mica that I knew discolored in cold process to orange, but didn't think about contact within my finished product. I was dismayed when I went to take pictures until I remembered I used Nature's Garden Citrus Strawberry fragrance, so I just changed it to an Orange Strawberry Parfait.) Most of the white soap I left unscented. My fondant strawberrys were too small to use as a topper so I just added my leftover chocolate soap that I was playing with my piping. I watch too many cooking shows sometimes, 
I wanted to frost the outside of the mini swirl cakes, but I didn't manage my time very well. The middle frosting was still very squishable while my frosting soap was stiffening fast. And I was getting tired. These soap take quite a bit of work. Since I couldn't pipe the fancy cake frosting on, I decided to dip my mini strawberry fondants into some clear melt and pour to make glazed strawberries. I love glazed strawberries. 


My brownie bites were the easiest to make. I just poured some chocolate soap into my mini cupcake silicone pan. I wanted the top to look a little flaky like a real brownie, so I put some crinkled plastic wrap on the top. I thought it worked rather well. Since it was so simple I wanted to add some chocolate mint leaves. I was going to just use tempered cocoa butter tinted green, but I'm running low on cocoa butter. I was just going to brush it on some real mint leaves and leave it one until it solidified. Yeah, another product of watching cooking shows. So I thought I would just go ahead and try with the cold process soap. It worked great,though you really should try to get the leaf off as soon as you can. It kinda wilted into soap and didn't want to come off so easy when I left it too long.


The gingerbread house was inspired by a cookie cutter I bought before my Alco closed. I made some brown soap with cocoa powder. I wasn't going to scent it at all since I had the bleed through problem, but I couldn't leave off. So I added some lemon cake fragrance since I didn't have a gingerbread type scent. At least my soap gingerbread would have a bakery type scent. Ack, this scent is AWESOME! I am totally rebatching some of my leftover soap in this scent. Love it. I had so much fun with the gingerbread. I had enough soap leftover to make little gingerbread people. One thing to note though: I put the gingerbread cookie cutter in the wet soap and let it solidify. I tried to cut another set in case I screwed up the first. Bad idea, the cutter is plastic and the soap crumbled horribly. The metal cookie cutters didn't have this problem.
Some of my mess and my horde of gingerbread people. I tried to pipe some roses with the leftover frosting soap.
Orange Strawberry Parfait, Strawberry Swirl Cake, Brownie Bite, Gingerbread

Close ups
I know that I could have been more patient and should have used another soap base. I keep using my bastile one that well, takes forever to get stiff. I have to say I know I have a long way to be great at this type of soaping, but for my first time, I think I did a decent job.

Thanks to all the people who commented on my last Challenge post. I really enjoyed reading your comments. I hope you all enjoy my mini soap desserts. I had so much fun making them and I still have a few ideas of others to make. 

7 comments:

  1. Cool stuff! I really like your gingerbread house and the gingerbread people posse made me smile :-)
    Your piped roses are really pretty, I was really impressed with those.

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  2. What a great idea~to make a gingerbread house! I love the color you chose for that one!!

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  3. These are all super cute! I love that you made a gingerbread house! And now I want to make little soap leaves...how cool is that?

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  4. I love the gingerbread house, it's really original. :)

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  5. Love your gingerbread house!!!! You did a really great job!

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  6. Your gingerbread house is so adorable! Love it!

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  7. Thanks everyone, I really enjoyed making it.

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