A Frugal Failure

Not everything that is cheap and home made and based on natural ingredients is good.
Back in the middle of Frugal February, I decided to make my own washing up liquid. I didn't mention it at the time because from the start I wasn't convinced it was worth recommending. I got the recipe off the internet and it was a mixture of washing soda, soap, white vinegar and lemon juice. I can't remember the quantities and it doesn't matter as no-one will want to make it.
I knew it wouldn't bubble like detergent and I could have got used to that but I found it made the water feel unpleasantly greasy. Maybe I was using too much to compensate for the lack of bubbles. It made plenty, in fact I still have half a tub left:

 And sometimes the cleaning was as good or better than  the bought stuff, in particular lifting tea stains off mugs but yesterday I gave in and bought this:

Why make myself unhappy or at least irritated and annoyed on a daily basis for the sake of 59p?

Back to the joys of bubbles once more.

More About Soap

The quest for perfection continues......
I am for the most part quite happy with my soap recipes, the fragrances are those I like and the texture is good. I have for the moment settled the problem of moulds in satisfactory economical recycling fashion. In the garage left over from when we used to make chutneys and flavoured oils, were 5 wooden boxes used to present a bottle of oil in. When lined with heavy duty rubber sheet (which I also had lying around the garage) these make a good standard mould for the soap to come out in bars ready for slicing.

If demand takes off I shall either buy commercial moulds or make longer wooden ones. I have even reconciled myself to the fact that every bar is different. These are hand made soaps and people are not looking for standardisation in size and shape.

What is bothering me still is the colour. I like the colours of natural plant dyes but some that I have used do not match the fragrance. Lavender (top left hand corner) is fine, the Apricot Skin Softener is the colour it is because it contains turmeric which has benefits to the skin including reducing the signs of ageing (no wonder it is my favourite!).

No, the one that really bothers me is the Verbena. At the moment it looks like cheap cheddar:

It is likely that this orange colour will fade to a soft peach as the curing process takes place, but even so verbena (aloysia triphylla) is a green plant with delicate white flowers that smells strongly of lemon:

To my mind the soap needs to be green or pale yellow. It is a shame that the Gardeners soap came out like this as this is much more suitable for Verbena.

So I have made another batch of the Gardener's Soap (contains pumice, tea tree, pine and lime oils) and tripled the amount of spirulina used to colour it. Hopefully this will give me a much darker green, freeing up the pale green for the Verbena.

The other colour problem is for the Lemon and Lime which is meant to be a fresh zesty soap suitable for the morning shower. When I was making it, the yellow of the beeswax looked so strong that I left it uncoloured, however it has developed into a beautiful cream colour

This is fine and attractive but it doesn't say Lemon and Lime to me (although I've had lemon flavoured ice cream in Italy that was very similar). I've decided to keep this natural cream colour for Honey and Oatmeal (fragranced with a hint of vanilla) and am still working on what combination of natural colours will work to produce a pale muted lime.

Frugal February Looking Forward to March Madness

White Rabbits once more! I know February is the shortest month, but it seems to have gone by very quickly despite a cold grey period in the middle, when I just wanted to stay in bed until it was warm again.
Now it is warm again, well, 8 degrees compared to 2, does feel warm, it's surprising how small a rise in temperature is needed to make the change from shivering under the bedclothes to being up and about doing things. Better still, it now gets light at a reasonable time in the mornings and the dawn chorus is singing away before six, encouraging me to get outside as there is stuff going on. This morning they encouraged me to hang my washing out at 6.15 am. It was still dark then, but it is a task out of the way and the washing should dry now, during the day, at no cost to myself or the environment.
February, was all about the February Frugal Challenge, which was very much about battening down the hatches and getting through the dark days of winter, spending as little as possible. On food spending I did pretty well, the total spend for the month was £72.83 nicely under our £80 budget, but overall I am £50 over budget. This is pretty well accounted for by £26 on a new tyre for the car, £12 on buying an extra pack of computer ink to gain a £4 discount and £10 more than budget on new pyjamas for Oliver. None of it is exactly frivolous stuff but I am still annoyed by the day I was late for my business course and was charged £13.50 for 4 1/2 hours parking by parking where I knew. The following week, a bit of time taken to research parking, found me in a nearer car park for £4.50. A total waste of £9.
I am not too concerned about the overspend though, as my overall spending was still pretty low, including mortgage, insurances, energy costs etc, the spend for February was about £800. Adding £200 as a security net for contingencies, I now know, that I need to generate about £1,000 a month to cover costs, which does not seem too unreasonable. My previous salary was £35,000 but I will be much happier on £12,000, having to watch the spending and make all the economies, is more than made up for by the freedom to spend my time as I please.
Looking forward to March, the emphasis will be on how I am going to generate that money, and hopefully will be a whirl of activity on the soapy business, ready to launch ourselves on the unsuspecting world in April.
As cold process soaps take 4 weeks before they are safe to use, (time for the caustic soda to become fully neutralised), this means I have to make all the soap I want for the launch, this week. Yesterday, I made a soap for the gardener. It has ground pumice stone in it to help clean off the engrained dirt after a gardening session and tea tree oil, which is a natural antiseptic for scratches and prickles. I wanted to colour it a subtle green using spirulina, a sort of dried algae, but I don't think I used enough and given the base colour from the beeswax, it is now an odd sort of dirty grey yellow. I'm hoping it will mute nicely over the four weeks as the lavender soap did. Today's Soap of the Day I think, will be lemon and lime, a nice zesty soap for early morning showers.

Bread and Butter

No, I don't mean that figuratively, I really do want to write about bread and butter.

After Christmas and the New Year, I was left with a pint of double cream that we had not got round to opening for various reasons, much as I adore cream and indeed most fats, I was not going to eat a pint of double cream by myself so I decided to make butter with it.
It isn't difficult, simply put the cram into the food processor and beat as if you were whipping cream and then got interrupted at the point when it is whipped and left it to go very stiff. At this point add a cup of cold water and beat again until the butterfat separates from the buttermilk and it looks like this:

Pour off the buttermilk into a bowl and beat a little more, before turning the remaining lump of butter out on to a chopping board. It is then necessary to work the butter with a pair of wooden spatulas or spoons to get the remaining water out. You can buy specialist 'butter hands' which probably do the job much better but if you only make butter occasionally it isn't worth it.

After a few minutes squeezing and rolling, it looks like this:

Now is the time to add salt if you want, and work that evenly into the butter. 

So there you have a nice piece of butter ( I checked out of interest and it weighed 9 oz), and a bowl of buttermilk, which is obviously calling out to be made into soda bread or possibly buttermilk scones.

On this occasion it was soda bread:

It didn't stay like this for long, a few minutes later it looked more like this:

Liquid Soap

So I thought I would have a go at making liquid soap from some left over scraps of my Apricot Skin Softener Soap. It was quite a fancy soap using apricot kernel oil, almond oil and shea butter and scented with geranium and orange but these were what you might call offcuts, the bits at the side of the block that didn't look too good. Anyway it was very simple and the result is hugely satisfying, bottled in a recycled liquid soap bottle as you see above.
At the moment it is sitting on the kitchen windowsill by the sink being used everytime I come in from the chickens or after cleaning up after the dog and my hands are in sore need of softening, however I think it would also be useful as a substitute for shower gel. Maybe I will make some more for the bathroom, possibly with my favourite lemon verbena.
Here is the recipe if you fancy having a go.

100g soap grated or in scraps
300g water
1 tsp glycerine

Put the soap in a jug. Boil 200g of the water and pour it over the soap, whisk until dissolved. Add the remaining water at room temperature and the glycerine and whisk with a stick blender until smooth. Allow to cool and pour into a sterilized bottle.
I made mine using a double boiler and just let the soap scraps dissolve slowly whilst I got on with other things.
This would be also be a really useful way of using up the slivers of soap from the end of a bar and I think this was actually done during the war for that reason.