Peppermint Steak Soap

For soapers it's full swing holiday time! With 6-8 weeks cure time, we need to start early to be able to gift or sell holiday themed soaps. I would imagine those who sell soap had to start a couple months back even to give the customers a wider range of time to buy. Since mine are just gifts I can pretty much soap until November 1st, 6 weeks from then would put me at mid December and give me enough time to mail them out!
I started with a few fall soaps, Pumpkin & Apple (Green & Red) and now it's on to less Thanksgiving and more Christmas. I'm not a huge fan of intensely spicy scents, they all smell like faux cinnamon to me, but I wanted a few 'classic' holiday smells. What could be more classic than plain ol' peppermint candy canes?!

I love my column mold to death, it's the Heavy Duty Column Mold from Bramble Berry, but it makes quite a lot of soap for my small potatoes production. I wanted about 6 bars ideally. I know I like to cut the circular bars at about 1 inch so the math wasn't terribly hard to work out for 6 (+ a little give).

I only have a foot long ruler and with the liner this mold is too tall for that, so I used a tape measure. I put a piece of trusty painters tape at the inch level I wanted first.

Then I stuck the measuring tape into the assembled mold...

And pressed the tape against the side of the mold (I had to use a butter knife since my hands are slightly too big to fit in the mold and still be dexterous). It only had to be stuck on for a little bit, but did have to be stuck enough not to just float away if water touched it. After the tape was in place, I filled the mold up to the tape line with water then poured the water out into a measuring cup. I rounded slightly up to 24 ounces of liquid. So now I know that I need to make about 24 ounces of soap to fill this mold to 6 1/2".

Electric bubble gum and Merlot sparkle mica for a deep Christmas red. It's not the normal fire engine red that I would have liked, but I don't have access to that color. Red-red is hard to come by in soap and often bleeds.

12oz of red soap, 12oz of white soap!

I poured red, white, red, repeat. I really wish I had used my long spout containers for this though, a fair amount of dribble happened. This doesn't seem like much, but when you drip on the sides and then pour up to that level, those soaps have drip marks on the sides of the bars. It doesn't REALLY matter, but it is a very impressionistic pattern on the sides and a totally different one on the cut faces.

And since I can't keep my chopsticks to myself, the top bar got a happy little swirl!

In the end I ended up with over 7" of soap! I cut them slightly bigger than 1" so I got 6 full bars and a thinner one to be a tester for me.

Image of the outside drips I referenced before. A narrow longer spout would have decreased some of this messiness on the sides of the mold.

All in all I really like how these came out. Each one is so different from the others! I don't even mind the maroon color they ended up. They still look and smell very jolly.Some of them look very much like deliciously heavily marbled filet mignon. Mmmm steak soap.