Now, after a lot of extensive research into the making of soaps, and to be honest I used to work for Lush in their Bubbles department making solid bubble bath so I know how hard and complex the process of making soaps from scratch can be, so I decided I would melt down existing soaps and pimp them out. The process of melting and reshaping soap is called rebatching and tutorials all across the Internet make it out to be very simple and very quick - simple, yes. It is not, however, quick.
I started with the chocolate soap because I wanted to make chocolate chips to put in the soap cookies - it seemed to go from bad, to worse, to thinking I probably shouldn't have even bothered, to melted liquid soap. The recipe called for cocoa powder but I didn't have any of that so I used the next best thing....Cadbury's drinking chocolate....except when I shook it in (yes I know, a sensible person might have used a spoon) I kind of slipped and shook too much in - d'oh! - and I could hardly spoon some out and put it back in the jar (soapy hot chocolate....mm mm nice!) so I just stirred it all in and put it back in the microwave for another 30seconds just for good measure.
Now, I have never made chocolate chips before and I thought as long as I could come up with some sort of pipette, that they should be easy to make. Ha! Again, I was mistaken - I didn't have a pipette and my son seems to have absconded with the big medicinal syringe we have and promptly hidden it, so I used the only thing I could think of.....a straw. I sucked up some soap mixture and then removing my finger from the top end it dripped onto a foil lined baking tray. It didn't form a small peaked chip, just a small splodge, and it was slow and tedious work. After a while I gave up and just poured the rest of the mixture into some tiny silicone cupcake cases and left them all to 'set'. I grated half a bar of soap and produced an over sized coffee mug worth of chocolate mixture. Amazing how it seems to grow in volume four-fold.
Next for the cookie dough. Real cookie dough is smooth and then crumples up when baked so I had to work out how to make this crumpled up texture. I grated a whole bar of soap and added it to the scrapings of the chocolate batch and topped with water. Put it in the microwave and stirred it every 60seconds until it melted. This time, the mixture was not melting so good, so I kept adding a bit more water, and then it still didn't melt, so I added some vanilla essence (no, not essence oil like all the recipes state, actual vanilla extract that you would use in normal baking). After some more zapping the mixture still wasn't smooth enough and it seemed extremely dark brown in colour (the chocolate scrapings were minimal, maybe it was the overkill on the drinking chocolate that made them super strong?) so I thought "hey, some of the recipes showed they used goats milk in them" and I'm sure you've guessed by now that I didn't have goats milk either, just plain old semi-skinned milk. In the end I added quite a lot of milk (I wish I'd bought more than 2 pints now) but it mellowed out the colour so its did the trick. Then I added the oats (OK, OK, ready-oats which are just the shops own brand cheap version of Ready-Brek).
I was under the impression that as the soap mixture would cool it would go from a smooth liquid into a more stodgier one and so on until it turns into an almost pliable crumbly mess....and hey ho....I was right. Shaping some by hand into cookie shape and size I then poked in the chocolate chips (I initially wanted to stir them in like you would on normal cookies but the chocolate soap hadn't seemed to have set hard enough yet). I ended up poking chips into both sides because I thought it most likely that people would view them from either sides and I wanted them to appear as cookie-like as possible.
I managed to make 16 out of the mixture with no leftovers - amazingly fluky because I only wanted 16!
I started with the chocolate soap because I wanted to make chocolate chips to put in the soap cookies - it seemed to go from bad, to worse, to thinking I probably shouldn't have even bothered, to melted liquid soap. The recipe called for cocoa powder but I didn't have any of that so I used the next best thing....Cadbury's drinking chocolate....except when I shook it in (yes I know, a sensible person might have used a spoon) I kind of slipped and shook too much in - d'oh! - and I could hardly spoon some out and put it back in the jar (soapy hot chocolate....mm mm nice!) so I just stirred it all in and put it back in the microwave for another 30seconds just for good measure.
Now, I have never made chocolate chips before and I thought as long as I could come up with some sort of pipette, that they should be easy to make. Ha! Again, I was mistaken - I didn't have a pipette and my son seems to have absconded with the big medicinal syringe we have and promptly hidden it, so I used the only thing I could think of.....a straw. I sucked up some soap mixture and then removing my finger from the top end it dripped onto a foil lined baking tray. It didn't form a small peaked chip, just a small splodge, and it was slow and tedious work. After a while I gave up and just poured the rest of the mixture into some tiny silicone cupcake cases and left them all to 'set'. I grated half a bar of soap and produced an over sized coffee mug worth of chocolate mixture. Amazing how it seems to grow in volume four-fold.
Next for the cookie dough. Real cookie dough is smooth and then crumples up when baked so I had to work out how to make this crumpled up texture. I grated a whole bar of soap and added it to the scrapings of the chocolate batch and topped with water. Put it in the microwave and stirred it every 60seconds until it melted. This time, the mixture was not melting so good, so I kept adding a bit more water, and then it still didn't melt, so I added some vanilla essence (no, not essence oil like all the recipes state, actual vanilla extract that you would use in normal baking). After some more zapping the mixture still wasn't smooth enough and it seemed extremely dark brown in colour (the chocolate scrapings were minimal, maybe it was the overkill on the drinking chocolate that made them super strong?) so I thought "hey, some of the recipes showed they used goats milk in them" and I'm sure you've guessed by now that I didn't have goats milk either, just plain old semi-skinned milk. In the end I added quite a lot of milk (I wish I'd bought more than 2 pints now) but it mellowed out the colour so its did the trick. Then I added the oats (OK, OK, ready-oats which are just the shops own brand cheap version of Ready-Brek).
I was under the impression that as the soap mixture would cool it would go from a smooth liquid into a more stodgier one and so on until it turns into an almost pliable crumbly mess....and hey ho....I was right. Shaping some by hand into cookie shape and size I then poked in the chocolate chips (I initially wanted to stir them in like you would on normal cookies but the chocolate soap hadn't seemed to have set hard enough yet). I ended up poking chips into both sides because I thought it most likely that people would view them from either sides and I wanted them to appear as cookie-like as possible.
I managed to make 16 out of the mixture with no leftovers - amazingly fluky because I only wanted 16!
They are sat atop of the oven 'setting' for the next 48hrs. When I have watched QI on BBC iPlayer and then taken myself off to bed, I will take photos of them, most probably tomorrow (hopefully my kids wont have tried to eat them - they have been told they are NOT edible because they are soap - but you never know with kids!) and then put them to this post.
TOODLE-PIPS
x♥x
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