Looking at this picture, many of you may think to yourselves, "That's nice. Why are you making me look at it though?".
These two bars come from a batch of soap that was made yesterday. They're 2 of 150 Hair of the Dog soap bars I just sliced and racked for curing.
To me, I see the most beautiful thing in the world! (next to my wife that is....and maybe a sunrise over fresh powder in the Utah mountains)
These two bars represent a great success. These two bars are a culmination of dogged determination and seamless teamwork.
For months, maybe even a couple years now, I've been trying to get our Hair of the Dog soap bars to look like this. To the casual observer, these probably look like your average swirly soaps and so aren't really brag worthy. But, for me, they're perfection. You see, making Hair of the Dog soap has been a huge struggle to get "right". I'd rather sit through an ABBA show than make Hair of the Dog. I'd rather stand in line at the DMV for a root canal than make Hair of the Dog!!!
Why, you ask? Because I've made thousands of bars of it and for some sciency ding dang reason, when I mix the Whiskey, (secret blend), and Coffee scents into the oil and lye/water mix, the whole thing starts to set up faster than an Outlaw on the run <insert your own funny thing there if you want>, which means it starts to thicken twice as fast as "normal" batches of soap, and by the time I start pouring it into the molds, it's lumpy and getting hard and so nearly impossible to swirl. And because it's so clumpy (yes, that's a technical soap maker term...as far as you know), it often leads to bubbles in the batch. And not the tiny kind that everyone loves in their champagne!
I'm making soap not swiss cheese, dagnabit!
So, this time around, I asked my lovely and talented wife to join me in the soap making process, specifically to swoop in when alerted, and start swirling her heart out. Not literally.
We gently mixed everything together and Danielle poured each batch into the mold and started swirling. Usually, things are so messy and getting hard (the soap....get your mind out of the gutter) that we're unable to get the top even and artfully swirled on top. Not this time! Everything went smoothly....literally.
What we've learned is that it takes two of us to tame Hair of the Dog.
And now I really feel like having some Whiskey.
