Since this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, I didn't have a pint of whipping cream on hand to use. So I used a pint of Creamy Select Vanilla. I'm lactose intolerant and can't drink a lot of milk. So I use a milk substitute: Creamy Select. I'ts made from milk, but has the lactose replaced with dextrose.
Friday night I made some up some extra thick Creamy Select (using twice as much powder as usual), mixed it with the grated soap, and set it aside to soften the soap. Saturday morning I put it all in the crock pot to melt down.
The soap melted down nicely and when it was ready I added more Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance and some ground hazelnuts and oatmeal. Then I poured it into my mold.
This morning I unmolded the soap. I was very happy that there are no air pockets in this loap. But it was still very soft--too soft to use the mitre box to cut it as I usually do. I was impatient and cut a few slices anyway. I didn't cut them very well without the miterbox.
I squished the slices I'd cut into soap patties and used my cookie stamps to decorate the tops. The soap was so sticky that it was sticking to the ceramic cookie stamps, and the designs looked horrible.
Then I remembered something I saw in a Soap Queen TV video on youtube. In one of the videos, Anne Marie mentioned using cyclomethicone as a mold release when using plastic molds with cold process soap, because cyclomethicone would not saponify as oil would. I decided to try it on my stamps.
I poured a little cyclomethicone into a small dish and dabbed it onto the teapot stamp using a pastry brush. Then I pressed the stamp into a soap pattie. Oh my goodness. It worked so well! The detail was awesome. I quickly tried the heart-and-flowers stamp, which is more detailed than the teapot stamp. It turned out awesome, too. I've never before seen this much detail when I used this stamp.
I was having so much fun I ended up squishing half the loaf into soap patties! But I'll leave the other half to harden up and then I'll use the mitre box to cut them into nice slices.
