Heart on Sleeve

Finally, an up date on my bath bomb adventures. This adventure has just begun yet I feel I have been working on it for ages. Like most projects I take on they are much more complicated then I had expected. It all started when I fell in love with these cupcake bath bombs I saw, but after reading their ingredients I fell out of love just as quickly. I talked before about how I hate filler/fake/unnecessary/unnatural (the list goes on) ingredients in my products. And these most adorable cupcake bath bombs were full of them. Not to mention they had animal products as well. I just wanted one of these most cute bath bomb cupcakes for my own that I was determined to make them. Once I got into what all was in the cupcake bath bombs I realized that the bath bomb it self was only the cake part of the cupcake and that the ‘frosting’ was basically just for looks. So one step at a time I started with just the cake part, the search for the perfect bath bomb recipe was on. I spent many many hours online reading how to recipes, blogs of others who have attempted it and looking up all the basic ingredients to find out what they really were. I found a ton of recipes, but they all seemed to fall short of my expectations. All recipes used baking soda and citric acid across the board, after all those are the main players that make the bath bomb do its bath bomb thing. So I started with those two as definite ingredients, the baking soda was easy however tracking down citric acid took a little extra footwork and turned out to be pretty expensive. I will definitely need to find a better supplier for that if this master recipe I created works out. Now that I had those two parts nailed down I needed to fill in the rest with some amazing ingredients. I couldn't believe what some of the recipes used, borax for example. Yes, borax is used in many household cleaners but it is also used as a fire retardant, as an anti-fungal compound for fiberglass and as an insecticide(thanks wikipedia). None of those equal indulgent bath time to me. I needed my bath bomb recipe to be moisturizing and smell so good you could eat it. The hard part is that you can’t add too many wet ingredients or it will start fizzing and therefore be fizz-less once dropped in the tub. So I did some work on dry scents and moisturizers and came up with cocoa butter and fruit zest. I decided to go for a sort of chocolate and oranges scent. I found a source for 100% raw organic fair trade cocoa butter and ordered a whole pound of it. When the package arrived the whole thing smelled of chocolate, I have never received anything in the mail I considered eating. I also purchased an organic blood orange to zest, which is full of all its amazing orange oils and also adds the prettiest little flexs of orange throughout the whole bath bomb and a delicious smell. The zest also helps cut some of the sweetness from the cocoa butter making the over all scent not to sugary. So there was all my ingredients, all I needed now was something wet to give the bath bomb enough hold for me to mold it with out starting to fizz. Other recipes used every thing from witch hazel to just plain water; I decided to go with something that would add even more moisturizing benefits- organic almond oil. It worked perfect. So now my bath bomb recipe was complete and I whipped up a small bath today. I was a bit nervous about it but it went well. Only a few miss steps that were easy to correct and a little adjusting to the amounts of each ingredient and I was done with my first bath bomb. They are currently drying wanting to get ‘frosted’. Here they are.....so pretty.






Now I have to get to work on the frosting recipe. That is tomorrow’s project. Everyone cross your fingers as I am going into this part blindly.