The Kinder Soap Company

Reformulated and prettified! This fresh batch of Dark Chocolate soap contains generous lashings of cocoa butter and anti-oxidant rich cocoa powder that will leave you with soft, silky-smooth skin after each shower. It doesn’t smell strongly of chocolate, but you might just catch a whiff of the cocoa butter in the shower. (I still occasionally stick my nose into my stash of cocoa butter just to inhale that heavenly scent!)

Dark Chocolate will be available for sale from March 22nd. As always, pre-orders are welcome — just send me an e-mail. Have yourself a lovely weekend.

Ah, hello there prettily-swirled soap! I made this batch a few days ago and they are now curing. Yes they do look quite different from the ones I made earlier , and I think this design will stay.

Available for sale from March 21st (but you can always order ahead by sending me an e-mail).

I read somewhere that one soapmaker likened churning out a batch of cold process soap to making a banana cake in your kitchen. They are both just as easy or complicated to make, depending on how fancy you want the outcome to be. Now that I’ve been making soap for quite a while I can see how that comparison came to be.

Here are some photos of the utensils I can’t do without when I pull on my gloves to make a batch of soap.

Stainless steel pots. The one on the left is for making the lye solution (sodium hydroxide + water), while the larger one on the right is for warming up the oils. It’s important not to use any utensils that contain aluminium, as the metal reacts with sodium hydroxide and won’t do anything good for soap. Trust me on this, because I found out from first-hand experience. Ahem. :”>

Clockwise from bottom left corner: 2 heavy duty plastic pitchers (to measure out lye and for containing raw soap), 2 slotted spoons (to mix lye and oils), melamine mixing bowl (I usually mix my raw soap in there), another heavy duty plastic pitcher containing hand blender attachment, two stick thermometers and a rubber spatula (for scraping off every last little bit of soap from the sides of my mixing bowl).

My two stick thermometers (also known as meat thermometers). Very important, as I have to keep track of the temperatures of both the oils and lye mixtures, ensuring that they both fall within the same range of between 32C and 42C, before I can mix them together to get saponification going. Falling out of this temperature range can mean a failed batch of soap (so I read), although I have yet to experience this.

You can find these thermometers at specialty baking shops, the more uppity departmental stores and also your local hardware store. I bought mine from Isetan KLCC, as I was still holding down a full-time job nearby at the time.

And finally, the item that works the hardest for me — my trusty Philips hand-held blender. Without it, I could be stirring my raw soap mixture for 3 hours before it saponifies enough to be poured into molds! Thankfully it usually takes me just 5-10 minutes tops to bring my raw soap to trace.

So there you have it — a little tour of my kitchen utensils that help me make soap. Isn’t it great that they’re familiar items? No fancy specialty gear needed. And for the record, all these are used ONLY for making soap — I don’t use them to prepare any of my meals. While I take great pains to make sure they are thoroughly cleaned after each soapmaking session, I can do without the possibility of having traces of soap, essential oils or at worst, LYE, in my food!

Wanna know what it took for me to prepare 20 of these cute little gift packs of 4 soap bars each? In a nutshell, as a mom of 2 toddlers around whom the world can be construed as an accident waiting to happen, I can only safely (and sanely) do work like this when they’re both asleep at night. :”> So here’s how I went about it.

When I first got a confirmation on Shazmin’s order (thank you SO much my dear, you helped make Kinder Soaps’ new year start with a bang!) for 20 custom-made gift packs, I made a shopping list of all the stuff I’d need for the project, namely:

• 20 new flower pots
• red netting
• white netting
• get new soap labels done at my neighbourhood printer (Lap Soon is an AWESOME digital print shop!)

I had to get to work pronto, as Shazmin’s daughter’s birthday party was on Sunday morning and she confirmed her order on Thursday. So my Friday was jam-packed with errands. It looked like this:

• 8:30am Send Brandon to playschool
• Do house chores and entertain Andrea at home
• 10:30am Put Andrea to bed
• 12:00pm Get dressed, wake Andrea, bustle her into the car to go fetch Brandon from playschool
• 12:30pm Settle the kids at in-laws’ home for the afternoon
• 1:00pm Head over to Lap Soon to print and trim labels
• 2:00pm Zoom off to IKEA to buy pots and netting after lunch at the Curve
• 4:00pm Zoom back home for a short break
• 6:30pm Meet hubby and kids at in-laws’ for dinner
• 9:30pm Come home and put the kids to bed
• 10:30pm Start work on gift packs

First was the labeling, which I did at our dining table (it’s the only area that’s large enough to accommodate all my junk. Then once all the soap bars were neatly arranged in piles on the table I started filling in the pots with their contents:

And once they were done I arranged them on the floor by the piano:

Then came the final wrapping up in white netting to hold all the contents together. I’m very glad I can avoid having to resort to plastic shrink wrapping as most conventional gift packs are done up. Oh alright, it wasn’t really an option to begin with since I don’t have the means or know-how to get the equipment to do shrink wrapping in the first place! But yeah, I’m glad I can use netting instead—and to good effect as well:

Hubby took this photo of me at about 12:15am. This was by far the toughest part of the night, as I had to sit on the floor for about an hour to put the finishing touches to the gift packs. I was sitting on a low foot stool to help keep my back straight—but with my 4-month-old baby bump it was still a real challenge to stay comfortable in that position! But I really was happy at work, so that kept the cursing at bay. The floor work included cutting up the huge swathes of white netting to wrap the pots in, arranging them nicely on the floor, then finishing off the pots with little red ribbons to neaten the tops of each gift pack.

And that was my first experience doing a large gift pack order at such short notice! I had a tremendous amount of fun in the process, but to be honest after that experience, I am even more conscious about listening to my body’s rest signals especially now that I’m pregnant. On Saturday I was still on a high from completing the job, but come Sunday I zombied through most of my hours spent with the kids.

However, all things considered, a little madness like this is what makes life SO enjoyable! What do You do to keep you excited about your life?

I finally carved out some time a few nights ago to put my new formulation for my Dream Time Soap to the test—it’s turned out great, and my balcony smells so pleasant now that they’re sitting on my curing rack for the next 3-4 weeks to dry out.

This soap is intended for you who have sensitive skin that is prone to acne flare-ups, and especially those with reddened skin on the face when aggravated by stress or external pollutants. (Which of course means everyone else can use it too. ) My intention is to help soothe your inflamed skin, albeit perhaps only temporarily because of the vast number of underlying causes to your skin condition. Guess what—my skin behaves like this occasionally as well.
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Treat your face and neck to a real breakfast spread that will leave it comforted, soft and supple. This mask is great for all skin types, but those of you who need to care for dry skin could potentially benefit from it even more.

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It was yet another fun (albeit tiring towards the end because I was soooo hyper in the beginning) outing for Kinder Soaps at Jaya 33. Not only was I blessed with surpassing my initial sales target, I even completed a labour of love that has taken me about half a year to finally bring to fruition. I know this will sound boastful, but it really IS visually stunning.

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Here’s what I’ll be readying for sale at my booth at this weekend’s Jaya 33’s bazaar, starting tomorrow:

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Recall that I was all excited about conducting soapmaking classes at a local girl’s school.

Well, it’s still happening this July 16th—but it turns out that I won’t be paid. Read more

Last week I was poking around www.beauty360degrees.com to get some essential oils for my next batch of soap. There was such a variety on offer, it was quite difficult to rein myself in and not get carried away! So I finally settled on 5 bottles. They arrived beautifully and safely packaged on Saturday morning—the start of my excellent purchasing experience with them.

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