DIY Homemade Bath Fizzies – Pfffff

Back to the spa basket I am putting together: Next I wanted to make some nice fragrant bath fizzies, to give a bath some effervescence. It’s probably going to be overkill in the basket with the homemade bubble bath, bath salts and sugar scrub, but it seemed like an interesting challenge.There were lots of different recipes from the boards, but ultimately, I chose  the one that Martha recommended.  The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

I assembled all of the ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cups baking soda
• 2 cups cornstarch
• 1 cup citric acid
• Food Coloring
• Essential oil (I mixed vanilla and lavender)

You also need a mold, and some water in a spray bottle.

Martha suggests mixing the baking soda, cornstarch and citric acid together and running them through a sieve to remove the chunks. Mine wasn’t very chunky to begin with, so instead of dirtying the sieve, I just stirred the mixture together with a wire whisk to make sure there were no lumps. Also, I didn’t have two cups of cornstarch, so I did a mixture of 1/2 cornstarch and 1/2 arrowroot. This, I am telling you in the interest of full disclosure.

Next, per Martha’s instruction, I took one cup of the mixture and put it into a glass bowl. After adding red food coloring to my water bottle, I spritzed the mixture a bit and then whisked, spritzed and whisked until I had a thick, almost doughy kind of paste. This process was really tricky because every time the water came in contact with the mixture, it began to bubble, and Martha said that I should not let it fizz. This was also the point when I added the essential oils, but they made it fizz as well.

I put the mixture into silicone baking molds, and left them to dry for two hours. But, as the time passed, the little scented cakes rose out of their molds! There seemed to be a lot of air inside of them, and I began to fear that this would be the only fizz they produced. Was this because I used too much water? Was it because of the arrowroot? I’m not sure.

In any case, I scraped off the top and pushed what was left down into the mold. Came back a little later and the cakes were really dry. So dry that they couldn’t be removed from the molds without cracking. So I added some more water and packed them down. This time, they dried overnight, but in the morning, they were still too fragile to remove from the mold. Plus they smelled less like lavender and vanilla and more like Play-Doh.

And, this was really the essential part of the whole thing, they didn’t fizz when I put them in water.

I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I will try again when I get more citric acid and cornstarch. I refuse to be beaten by Martha though, so I WILL be making this one again.  I’ll let you know…