Cherries and Chocolate!

[donotprint] Two of favorite things are cherries and chocolate. I love cherry anything including cherry jello. And I can eat about anything covered in chocolate except bugs!

Last year our cherry trees didn’t produce at all. This year it looks like we will have enough for several cobblers and to add some 2-cup bags to the freezer.

Cherries on one of our trees

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Now to the chocolate. Dave’s been wanting to make a chocolate soap. Well, it didn’t take any arm twisting to get me to put together a soap formula involving chocolate.

Chocolate Soap [print_link]

Coconut Oil (25%) 225 grams

Olive Oil (30%) 270 grams

Palm Oil (30%) 270 grmas

Cocoa Butter (10%) 90 grams

Castor Oil (5%) 45 grams

Distilled Water – 342 grams

Lye – 124 grams

1/2 ounce baking chocolate chopped

2 tablespoons of ground chocolate beans

This makes 4 lbs or 10 bars. As with any recipe you get off of the Internet, please run this through one of the lye calculators. This calculator is my favorite.

Please refer to cold process instructions here. We added the chopped baking chocolate to the oils. The ground chocolate beans were added to trace.

Chocolate Soap

Yum! It smells like chocolate already, but will smell even better once it’s cured. Now to wait four weeks or not!