Uh Oh! Spaghetti-os

Who out of my readers like to cook or bake? Do you experiment in the kitchen? How many of your experiments turn out good? How many turn out bad? So tonight I may have made the best loaf of soap ever or the worst. I still consider myself relatively new when it comes to soaping. I've done a lot of melt and pour and I now have three batches of cold process soap under my belt. Well, I'd make that two because tonight's little incident may or may not mean I get to venture into the world of rebatching or the hot process.

I made a rookie mistake. I've been warned about it, I've read about it and now I can officially write about it. My batch tonight seized up on me. :(

I wish I panicked when this happened but I'm not one of those people. When something horrific happens I am always calm and collected - I freak out later. But in the moment I'm a cucumber. Now is when I'm ugly crying. Oh, I'm sorry. You have no idea what I'm freaking out about do you? For those of you who don't know what sezing soap is or looks like, don't you worry buttercup I got you.

Yum! Just kidding, don't eat that.

Soap can seize for any number of reasons but the bottom line is it heated up too fast and hardened too quickly. Soap is supposed to be a nice and thin pudding like substance when you pour it into the mold and after 24-48 hours it hardens into a cut able loaf and you can make bars which then harden further until they are safe to use.

Now the funny thing about this is it didn't have to go down like this. I was trying a new recipe (BAD IDEA) with a fragrance in which I hadn't used before (IDIOT) and had no clue what it would do (Now you know Brainiac). Worst of all it was a citrus blend which is notorious for accelerating soap but I can't help myself I love fruity scents! To top it all off I didn't make a test batch I made a full batch like an idiot! I was just going to fragrance part of it too but then when the first part hardened on me I put it into the soap that I hadn't touched and then BOOM all of it went nutso. I was able to beat it into submission. No literally, I beat it with the stick blender until it became workable and then I just globbed it into my mold.

It looks really bad being all lumpy but maybe I can say it is rustic? It looks like pureed pumpkin to me. I kind of wish it was pumpkin scented now. I used Tumeric to color it and it was supposed to make it yellow. It's not yellow, it's orange. :( It smells ridiculously good though, even my mom thought so. So either this is going to be my favorite bar of soap or the worst bar of soap ever made and a good lesson.

I'm going to let it sit for a few days before cutting it. At that point I'll determine whether or not to rebatch it, which is where I grate it down and then heat it up and put it in the mold to cool all over again or whether I keep it as is and have some lovely orange soap!

Update 01/30/12: I cut the soap this morning and it looks perfect! I was so lucky. It may have looked bad all together from the top view but now that it is cut it looks like I intentionally made the top look that way and it smells DELICIOUS. Seriously, if I didn't know it was soap I'd want to eat it. Yum.

What's the worst crafting blunder you've encountered before?