While cleaning seeds from the gourds, I noticed that the starchiness that gets on my hands does not easily wash off. I can wash with my own soap and feel clean, but after drying I still have a starched feeling on my hands. I got to wondering what that would do in a soap as I have oily skin and figured it may be a good thing if it came thru in the finished soap. So I saved the "matrix" as I call it, from scraping the middle of two princess pumpkins. The web of fibrous moist stuff that suspends the seeds in the middle of the cavity is what I refer to as the matrix. I always dry the seeds to snack on. As I seperated them from the matrix, this is where I was getting all the starchiness. Everything I scrapped free, minus the seeds, was then chopped fine with a stick blender into goat's milk. This goat's milk and pumpkin matrix is what I added to my regular soap recipe. I scented it with a warm, sweet blend of essential oils and have a soap that is a beautiful rich orange color and smells wonderful. One tester said the color and the natural scent bring you into autumn, then the lather has the crispness to go along with it. This soap is a soapmakers favorite.
Then, just last night we had baked a pumpkin and it came out of the oven in a syrup of its own juice that was an inch deep in the pan. This was a big pan that is made for 3 cake mixes worth of cake. So we poured that syrup out into a sauce pan to reduce into a sweet, truly pumpkin syrup. We were just sitting in the next room, but we let it scorch on the bottom. We hated this, but it was a done deed.
Later as we were outside watching the eclipse begin, we realized just what to do to fill in the few hours we intended to stay up to watch the eclipse.....Sugar is a great lather booster in soap. Charcoal is also a lovely soap ingredient as it absorbs impurities. Though the scorch on the bottom of our syrup pan may not approach charcoal, if it did go there even just a little bit, then that would be OK. So we made a batch of soap and swirled the pumpkin syrup throughout.
The scent for this soap should be warm for autumn, and yet cool for the winter season we are welcoming with its solstice eclipse. So we did the scent with a blend of cool mint essential oils, and just a little of the warm spiciness of benzoin essential oil. What a lovely fragrance surrounded us while making this soap. It's just an amazing blend of natural essences that captures our thankfulness for warmth in the midst of cold weather. A star is born..."Solstice Sweet".
2 comments:
You have been having a great time with Pumpkin! I made soap with Pumpkin Puree and it came out really lovely but the Syrup sounds really fascinating. And the 'matrix' sounds even cooler! You are very creative.
Just the other day I used the Solstice Sweet soap in the shower. I was surprised, but happily so, to find that the syrup had crystallized into a fine grain sugar. The soap has a delicate scrubby texture. I am delighted with it.
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