But this year I decided to try something different.
The original recipe was just a regular swirled cold process soap using pumpkin and pumpkin pie spices. It is a rich, spicy, wonderful soap.
This year's variation still uses real pumpkin, but instead of a swirled soap, it's a layered soap with goat's milk for added richness and cornmeal for a bit of natural exfoliation.
To make this recipe, you'll need a basic soap recipe that won't come to trace too quickly. You've got a lot of mixing and separating to do with this project, so you don't want it to thicken up too quickly! For this recipe I used:
- Coconut oil - 14 oz. (30%)
- Olive oil - 14 oz. (30%)
- Lard - 11.7 oz. (25%)
- Almond oil - 7 oz. (15%)
- Lye - 6.6 oz. (5% lye discount)
- water - 14.5 oz. (more than I'd normally use, but more water helps slow trace down)
- 2 Tbsp. of corn meal
- 1/4 tsp. of brown oxide or brown mica (I used Bramble Berry's Cappuccino mica)
- Powdered goat's milk - 1.5 oz.
- Canned or pureed fresh pumpkin - 3 oz.
- Fragrance or essential oil - approx. 2 oz. (see note below)
Note on fragrance oil.
Now your first thought would be to use a fragrance oil with "pumpkin" or "spice" in it. There are quite a few "pumpkin pie" and "pumpkin spice" fragrances that are wonderful. The challenge is that they usually contain vanilla and will discolor your soap brown. I wanted this soap to stay fairly orange - with just a bit of a beige shift from the goat's milk - so I used a warm, floral fragrance oil that felt appropriate to the fall holidays, but that I knew wouldn't shift brown.
