Lotions and Potions

Last night I made another batch of beautiful moisturizer. You see, I WAS going to nick some of Queen Malina on the Front Deck's honey for Christmas pressies, but the weather hasn't been quite right for gettin' in there and mucking about.

Sooo, I worked up 2.5 liters of the good stuff. I have blogged about this before, but here is it again, just because I always forget how easy it is to make, and how SUPERIOR and SUBLIME the end product is.

The key principle is 1 part oil to 4 parts water plus 5% total volume in vegetable emulsifying wax, which is added to the oil part. Both components are heated separately but concurrently to 75 degrees Celsius, then the water part is poured into the oil part while stirring. Too easy!

Basically this is what I do:

Ingredients:

• 4 parts water or rose water
• 1 part your favorite base oils (eg olive, macadamia nut, apricot kernel oil or a mixture)
• 5% vegetable emulsyfying wax from here (ie if you have a combined oil and water total of 100mls, then use 5gms vegetable emulsifying wax)

Whatchadoo:

• Place wax in saucepan and melt gently. Add rest of oils.
• Add water in separate saucepan
• Heat contents of both saucepans to 75 degreees c
• Add water into oil pan, whisking gently. Continue to whisk untill mixed.
• Turn off heat. leave to cool, stiring accaisionally.
• When mix is below 45 degrees add essential oils and preservative if you want to use it.
• Poor into clean jars

Most recipes say to do this in double boilers, but I don't bother. In terms of preservative, I now use a combination of citric acid and potassium sorbate. From what I have read, potassium sorbate is an excellent non toxic, safe mold and yeast inhibitor, but it needs a lower PH (thus the citric acid) to work best. I really don't use very much (perhaps 2 teaspoons of citric acid in 2.5 liters of moisturizer, plus 1 teaspoon of potassium sorbate. Both are available from brewing supply shops.

If you are not using herbal teas in your moisturizer, you probably don't need to use any preservative. This time, I infused the oil in fresh chopped comfrey leaves for a few days, so I added the preservative just in case.

Well thats it - suddenly I have jars and jars of beautiful luscious moisturizer for Christmas Pressies.

In other news, and speaking of potions, the Cougar came for dinner last night and left us with TWO bottles of Wild Brumby Schnapps - so I am studiously working my way through the Pear William one first. Hopefully there will still be some of this left for Christmas, otherwise we will need to get started on the Butterscotch one. For those of you who do not know, this is the BEST SCHNAPPS in the WHOLE UNIVERSE. Get your self some now. Over the internets.

The Cougar did disappear on Queenie for a while. The race report was - "THOSE GEARS - they shift like butter." And he would be right.

that is all.