My sincerest apologies for not logging on sooner, folks! I have been crazy busy and haven't had a chance to sit down and collect my thoughts so that I could share them with you. I started a new job a month ago and have been juggling a ridiculous schedule. I'm still broke, but now I'm busy and broke. It's a strange state to be in. :P
I haven't had a chance to make soap in over a month, so it is with great shame that I have no choice to but share the very last batch of soap that I made with you. I wanted with all my being to hide this batch in the Ugly Soap Closet of Shame and pretend it never happened, but alas I have nothing else to write about so here goes. Please be kind. No mother likes to admit or be reminded that her baby is not cute. My poor little bubble babies are definitely the opposite of cute.
Long ago and far away, my stingey self decided to "splurge" by buying a one pound bottle of fragrance oil because it was on clearance. The scent of this oil was Banana Cream Pie. The main reason I chose this scent was because it reminded me of a former boss. I used to work with a bunch of doctors, and one in particular blew my sheltered little mind one day. He walked into the office, asked everyone in the room, "Do they still make qualudes? Man, I miss qualudes!! I used to get so high on them and then I would eat an entire banana cream pie. Those were the days." He smiled nostalgically and then turned around and walked off just like that. It probably took at least an hour for me to get my jaw up off the floor.
Fast forward to me digging around in my cupboards years later and thinking, "Heeeyyyy, I never did make any soap with this scent. Let's make some today!" I ran off to the local grocery store to buy some banana baby food to throw into the batch. Soap newbs, you heard that right. Who doesn't want to rub pureed bananas all over themselves in the shower, right?? Oh la la! Actually, using fruit in soap is mostly for label appeal (put the word banana on a soap label and people literally go bananas), but all it really does is introduce a different form of sugar into your chemical equation (a.k.a. soap recipe) in order to produce more lather. Of all the fruits I've experimented with in soap, banana has been my favorite. I literally lurked the baby food aisle for a while while I experimented with different recipes. I'm sure it made the cashiers extremely nervous when I would buy one packet of baby food at a time since I don't have kids. I can only imagine what they were imagining as they tried to figure out what the heck I was up to.
So off I went back to my little kitchen to brew up a batch of banana soap. Everything went off without a hitch... except for one major detail. Apparently, the fragrance oil that I purchased for super cheap had a lot of vanilla in it. Soapers, you know exactly what happens when you use a vanilla-based fragrance oil in a batch of soap. The whole thing turns the color of poo. Much to my horror, as I cut my log of soap into slices, I couldn't help but notice that my bars of soap looked exactly like something that monkeys would fling at each other. Since the soap smells like bananas, it got me wondering if the turds that monkeys like to fling happen to smell like bananas if those monkeys recently came off a banana bender. These thoughts are not something you want running through your mind as you're scrubbing yourself clean with something that looks/smells like monkey dookies. *sigh* :C
So Dr. Qualude, I dedicate my monkey-poop-looking and Banana-Laffy-Taffy-smelling soaps to you. Thanks for the memories!
