There was brief fight over Marcus’s beautiful chocolate doughnut soap. I lost.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
There was brief fight over Marcus’s beautiful chocolate doughnut soap. I lost.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
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Chocolate. Donut. Soap. (Blinks a few times, carefully examines his beer, puts it down carefully & backs away, in case it develops an outbreak of peas or something…)
blf@#1:
No, really. It’s wonderful.
I made the mold using the ancient lost dunkin process. The soap is cocoa butter with raw cocoa powder and coffee grounds in it as an exfoliant. It’s amaaaazing.
It’s weird that they ate the “frosting” (which is also soap!) and didn’t go after the donut part, which has all the coffee and chocolate in it. Are rats allergic to coffee or chocolate?
Marcus:
Not in the least. :laughs: They are by no means done with the soap. As you can see, the surface is full of teef marks, and the bottom is also full of teef marks. They will reduce it to nothing, eventually. Actually, I found out if you give a coffee bean to a rat, they grab it and start gnawing like crazy. They *love* coffee beans. I’m not so crazy on caffeinated rats.
I’m not sure if “you”(not meaning the rats) are supposed to eat this stuff, drink it, or wash with it. None sounds in the remote appealing: Eating / drinking soap — ‘nuf said!; or
Washing with something that (presumably) smells — YUCK! With emphasis: YUCKITY-YUCK! I do not want to go around stinking of (in this case) chocolate (presumably), or the more usual fruits & flowers. FSMsdamnit, neutral(-ish) soaps & detergents, please!
</rant>Your rats are living the life, Caine! I never tried giving them coffee, I’d be afraid they’d take over -- but maybe that’s already happened!
Marcus, that soap sounds amazing, great idea to use the coffee grounds.
Well, at least the rats are clean, inside and out. Are they blowing bubbles when they squeak?
Marcus, that soap sounds wonderful; I don’t think I’d bathe with it (scent sensitivities), but it’d definitely be fun in the kitchen for washing hands.
blf @ 5:
You really don’t need to be such an ass. The soap is not a vat of cheap perfume. The scent blooms in hot water, but like most soaps, one a person is rinsed and dried, you can’t smell anything unless you are on top of them with your nose on their skin, and using the soap does not leave you stinking. I don’t care for people who walk about dosed in 5 gallons of any scent, either, but you are seriously and unpleasantly over reacting here, and being more than a bit thoughtless where Marcus is concerned. I deeply appreciate all the work he has put into the wonderful things he has made for me, at no cost. I don’t much care to see him and his work so thoughtlessly disrespected. I assure you, no one will hunt you down in France and insist you bathe with anything, or indeed, bathe at all.
Stellatree:
Oh, the coffee bean only happened once! The rats do like a drink of tea though, and will help themselves to mine. They don’t care for brewed coffee over much, but they’ll have a taste now and then.
The coffee grounds are a great exfoliant, and it’s a bonus they are natural, so there’s no plastic going into the ocean. I hadn’t ever thought to use coffee grounds like that, even though I make a hand scrub with oil (coconut or olive) and sugar, and use that regularly. Being a crocheter, you know how important it is to keep your hands snag free.
Anne:
Nope! It does gloss out their fur something amazing though. I’d be willing to try it myself, seeing the effects, but I can’t cope with soap eating, no matter how good it smells. ;D
I have some of Marcus’s lemon balm and lemon grass soap in the kitchen, it smells grand!
Me:
That reminds me though, back in the day, soap pills were popular. (I collect old medicinals.) I can’t quite remember the point of taking them now, I’ll have to look it up, but I expect it was digestion based.
Caine @ 9:
I make a coconut oil and brown sugar scrub, too. Definitely have to keep one’s mitts in shape for crafting! :-D
Stellatree, oh, brown sugar! Do you find that works better than white? I haven’t tried that.
I use brown because the crystals are a little finer than white, and it smells subtle but yummy with the coconut.
I bet it does, I’m going to have to try that.
My nose is “on” my skin. Scented soaps and detergents STINK! Without any (known-to-me) exception. It may be Ok for others, but FSMsdamnit, there are people for which this gunk is, if not literally poison, throughly and totally disgusting.
For instance, I have to hold my nose when walking past the shops which sell the local-ish Marseilles-style scented soaps. That is a concentrated dose of something I find exceptionally foul. (Weirdly, the open-air stalls aren’t so much a problem; either the soap is cheaper (less stink), or just being in the open-air dilutes it enough, or its old enough (exposed for long enough) the stink is mostly gone.)
It’s quite a problem finding suitably unscented (or very very mild / neutralish scents) soaps, detergents, dishwashes, and similar.
For what it is worth, I cannot stand most perfumes. Or incense. I’ve never been able to enter a shop burning incense, they simply reek. (Weirdly, scented candles don’t seem to be a problem.)
Finally, there are people for which some of this stuff will, literally, kill them. The one case I personally know of is an elderly farmer suffering from severe organophosphate(? organophosphorus?) poisoning (from sheep dipping (not to be confused with Sheep Dip whisky!)). For reasons I don’t know, certain artificial(?) scents — or perhaps residue from the manufacturing process — will set off an allergic(?) reaction with a risk of death. In the case of the individual I know, they have to buy / use specially-formulated soaps, et al., and effectively ban all perfumes and aftershave lotions (and a few other things as I now recall).
Geschmackssache , sprach der Affe und biss in die Seife.
German proverb. A matter of taste, said the ape and bit the soap.
not
You live in the country and region of handmade soap and you hate it? What a waste.
I hadn’t ever thought to use coffee grounds like that
I was drinking coffee while making soap. My press empty, I poured the dregs down the drain and rinsed the grounds in water and threw them under the rosebushes as I do. Then it hit me.
I’m not aware of anyone else who’s hit on the idea of coffee grounds as exfoliant. I will publish the recipe eventually, probably next time I make a batch.
With respect to its use: it smells sort of like a nice fudge brownie while you are bathing with it. And it looks like you’ve scrubbed yourself with a chocolate bar. But it rinses right off (that’s what soap DOES!) and it doesn’t leave any scent behind.
If you want soap to leave scent you have to use resins like frankincense, benzoin, etc -- basically pine tar.
blf@#16:
You could make your own, with no scent at all. Heck, if you want, I can whip up a batch of soap that’s nothing but coconut/castor oil, which would be practically scentless.
And if you hate scent, I’m sure you know how difficult it is to find unscented laundry detergent and shampoo. A bit of unscented hemp oil soap (which smells very slightly) would probably be just the thing for you. My project calendar is semi-full right now but I’m going to be doing a batch of white soap soon; if you want unscented, I can do that because “why not?”
Stellatree:
That sounds awesome!
Another fun thing to use for scrubs is dead sea salt. I, personally, try not to put bacteria food on me (for the same reason I wouldn’t wear my bacon underpants around a dog) so I prefer salt/baking soda scrub. Lemon verbena baking soda dead sea scrolls salt scrub is a winner.
I did some cocoa butter cream for Heina Dadaboy when she was still around here. I gather it was pretty good. So I made more for some of my other friends, including my girlfriend who now smells like hot cocoa when she gets out of the shower..
If anyone wants the recipes for any of these things I can publish them over at stderr. It’d give me something nice to talk about instead of military procurement and anarchy and how much cops suck.
Caine@#11:
That reminds me though, back in the day, soap pills were popular. (I collect old medicinals.) I can’t quite remember the point of taking them now, I’ll have to look it up, but I expect it was digestion based.
In the French army back in WWII and shortly before, soap suppositories were considered the cure for constipation. I learned that from an old (literally) friend of my father’s, when I was a kid, along with a graphic explanation that made me conclude that much of French medicine involved sticking things up the exhaust pipe of the Frenchman.
Marcus, I’d love any recipes you wanted to share, especially for the cocoa butter cream!
stellatree@#20:
Noted; I need to make another batch soon; so when I do I’ll take pictures and post.
Coffee grounds as exfoliant has been a thing for years, actually (at least, I’ve been using it semi-regularly since before I moved to Europa), but I doubt anyone has ever put them into chocolate soap like this. Honestly, that’s a tough combination to pass off as inedible, and I hope the rats don’t get too caffeinated on their journey through the donut!
Marcus
Please do!
I’ve always wanted to make soap and once we move into the house and I get to have an actual basement where I can work and store things I will try.