The Really Long Bread, and Two New Soaps!

I am up waiting for the damned bread to bake… I started it at about noon, and it is past midnight.  It better be good bread.   We got the recipe from the Bread Bible.  Yes, that is the name of the book.  It is a great book on all things bread, and it came to us from our lovely friends Terri & Sammy.  Now, the recipe is said to taste like “what Wonderbread wants to be and isn’t” but that remains to be seen.  I’ll report tomorrow on the yumminess of the crumb, but let me just say, their “basic white sandwich bread” was far from basic.

But seeing as I am up now at 12:20, I might as well report on the goings on in the soap-making world too, right?  Right!

Today we finished two–TWO–new soaps!  Lucky Jeff & Sheena will get to take home test bars tomorrow of honey chamomile and lavender vanilla.

I was going to just drop the chamomile buds right into the soap this time, just like I usually do, but the buds I purchased this year are so large and of such high quality, I decided to mash them up into a fine chamomile dust.

Mark helped out on this too, which was good, as he was very keen on keeping out as many stems as possible.

Here’s what we came up with once we added all the ingredients–the chamomile bud dust; pure Mass. honey; and Roman Chamomile Oil–to the hot melted base:

Now, at this point, this mixture smelled soooooo good, I wanted to eat it up.  But that would have been A. dangerously hot and 2. really nasty since, of course, it’s not just yummy honey chamomile sauce it’s soap.  Ick.  But imagine sticking your nose into a warm cup of chamomile tea and multiply it times 50.  It was amazing.

Then of course we pour it into the molds like this:

Today we did both bars and rounds.  Still haven’t received our awesome giant loaf mold which I’m slightly peeved about, but I’m being patient because I know the guy makes them individually 🙂  These ones turned out especially good, don’t you think?  Wish we had smell-o-blogging so you could enjoy the aroma too.

In our endeavor to create an L.P.E. stamp to press into each soap, we tried another technique of using rubber stamping material from which I carved out the letters.  But when I attempted to glue the rubber carving onto a piece of wood, the glue (I tried two–P.V.A. [probably a mistake] and household super glue cement stuff) _ate through_ the rubber…

So instead, we used some plain jane rubber stamps which worked out perfectly.

Here’s an example from our lovely lavender vanilla batch we finished today, after some melting and re-melting, and trying different ways of adding the lavender (we finally ended up grinding it up in the blender, which smelled amazing, *thanks Mark for the great idea!!).  These came out quite nice:

Ok.  Well, the bread is finally done.  And I have to say, it looks and smells delicious.  I’m going to bed now, but will have sweet dreams of fresh bread and warm chamomile.  I hope you do too!