February Soap Challenge - Lemon Birthday Cake

UPDATE: Lemon Birthday Cake won the Best Use Of Color recognition award!

Hi, guys!

I'm entering my second soap challenge! For February, the challenge was to find a friend or family member that has never made soap before and verbally guide them through making the challenge entry. This was tough. I'm not very articulate and I tend to be a "if you want something done right, do it yourself" sort of person, so having to explain and not touch was a challenge, indeed! However, I could not be happier about how Lemon Birthday Cake turned out! 

Lemon Birthday Cake is scented with Lemon Meringue Pie from Nature's Garden. It smells heavenly! It is equal parts lemon and sugary sweetness. For the oils, we used cocoa butter, olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, avocado oil, and castor oil.

I chose my friend, Kayla, to help me. Here's a horrible picture of us from a couple years ago, just to embarrass her a little. It is the best picture I could find of us on my Google album because most of our pictures are from a time when film was used. 😂 She's borrowing my husband's shirt.

I prepared the oils and lye and I measured out each layer, but Kayla did everything else. She happens to make gorgeous cakes, so I knew she would do well at this!

We started by mixing up the soap batter for just the bottom layer. This was colored with Fuchsia Lab Color from Bramble Berry. Lab Colors are similar to a food dye, using FD&C dyes to make vibrant hues.

After pouring the first layer and letting it set up for a bit, Kayla chose to texture it by twisting the end of a spoon in it and pulling up. She then added a sprinkle of Yellow Vibrance mica from Nurture Soap to create a yellow-gold pencil line. 

 I should add that I'm a bit jealous of how neat her line came out. I always make a mess on the inner sides of my mold when I create a mica line. Kayla barely had anything to wipe up. I may have to invite her over for my next mica line design.

The next layer was mixed up using titanium dioxide to make the batter white. Kayla then added a roughly equal amount of soap confetti. The confetti is something I keep on hand. It is made from grated bits of soap that were colored with aqua, fuchsia, canary, and royal purple Lab Colors from Bramble Berry.

This mixture was carefully poured over the first layer, textured with the spoon twist technique, and covered with another sprinkling of Yellow Vibrance.

The batter for the third and fourth layer was prepared in once batch which we split in two before adding color. Layer number three was colored with aqua Lab Color. This layer was not textured before the the yellow mica line was added. The final layer was colored with royal purple Lab Color and Queen's Purple mica, one of my favorite colors from Bramble Berry. 

I put Kayla's awesome cake decorating skills to work with an iced top, colored with Yellow Vibrance to match the mica lines.

The soap took for-ev-er to reach the perfect thickness, so we may have taken the time to run out for cheesecake and gooey butter cake to satisfy the craving that the lemon meringue fragrance gave me... 

Last, for the finishing touch, the top got an ample dusting of shimmery glitter.

This soap was so much fun to make because I got to share the fun! I definitely plan on more collaborations in the future. You can get your own bar of Lemon Birthday Cake here.