I was thinking a lot about making a Halloween/Thanksgiving/Autumn seasonal soap before we left for New Mexico and Texas but Justine REALLY got me thinking about it because she was telling me how much she loved Halloween and pumpkins. And being that I also love pumpkins (who wouldn't love those bright orange globes!), I decided to make a soap out of them. I wanted a soap that would look and smell like the real thing. So I was all excited when I put together my recipe soon after we got back from Texas, and on September 30th, I set to work making my soap. I chose to use 'in the mold' hot process because I wanted it to cook, just like a pumpkin pie. My ingredients are as follows:

extra virgin olive oil
palm oil
vegetable shortening
coconut oil
castor oil
canned pumpkin
pumpkin pie spices
fragrance oil (added later)

What I wound up with was not what I was expecting. Although the canned pumpkin that I used was very thick (which was why I used it), it all melted down within the soap and basically converted itself to liquid which added to the water ratio that you have to combine with lye. So I wound up with a really water-heavy soap. Just how water-heavy was it? It was SO water-heavy that it created little pockets of pumpkin within the soap loaf. These little pockets were seeping the excess water/pumpkin for days until it dried out. So... I wound up with a pumpkin soap that resembled swiss cheese. Well that wouldn't do!

So I grated the swiss cheese soap and tossed it into my crockpot. Since this was an already water-heavy soap, I minimized the amount of 'water' that you usually add to the crockpot to melt it back down. In this case, I used even more pumpkin. Hey! It's is after all supposed to be a pumpkin soap! I added just a little more spice to the mix and watched it melt down beautifully. The only problem was that even with all that pumpkin, it didn't really smell like pumpkin pie. So I made an addition of some fragrance oil.

I poured all the batter into the mold, let it set up and harden, cut into bars and stamped. With the trimmings (since they were still very soft), I rolled out the 'dough' and used pumpkin cookie cutters to make pumpkin soap cookies. I stamped those too just for grins.

They're drying quite nicely in the cupboard now and they DO smell like freshly baked pumpkin pie. I snuck a scrap to test and it works well. It gives off a non-staining, pumpkin-colored foam. They should be ready for use really soon.


Here's a picture of the pumpkin soap cookies. Pretty nifty, huh? I had to keep Bronwyn away from them. I was afraid she'd try to pilfer one to snack on.