Bath bombs away!

The Rangers are hoping to go on a joint scout and guide camp next year being held at Shrewsbury, so we are planning in lots of fundraising activities for them to do to help with costs.  One of these is having a stall at the Christmas fayre of the church where we meet.

We are trying out a number of crafts to make Christmas gifts for the stall and this week we made bath bombs.  There are lots of different recipes for these out there online and in books, but this is the method we used, which had been put together from several sources with the key factor being that ingredients were easy to find and relatively cheap.

You need:
4 parts Bicarbonate of soda
1 part cream of tartar
Essential oil in fragrance of choice
Food colouring if desired
Vegetable oil
Decorations if wanted
Metal or ceramic bowl - you can use plastic but it will absorb the fragrance so will be no good for food use afterwards.
Metal spoon - again you can use plastic or wooden but it will absorb the fragrance.

• Mix the bicarbonate of soda with the cream of tartar, this needs to be mixed really well so it is even throughout.
• Add the food colouring if you are using some, we used powdered and paste colorants as I had some in the cupboard and it keeps the mix dry which stops it fizzing before you want, but many of the recipes around use liquid colouring, I just wouldn’t add too much!
• Add your fragrance, we used lavender essence for one 'flavour' and we have tried a 'winter spice' fragrance by using ground ginger and ground cinnamon.
• Stir the mix thoroughly to make sure colour and fragrance are even throughout.
• Add the vegetable oil a little at a time and mix in completely until the mix begins to stick together
• spoon the mix into biscuit cutter shapes and press down firmly to compact, add some decoration to the top if you like, we used purple sugar glitter on the lavender bombs and a star anise on the winter spice.
• Leave on a tray until completely dry (this took ours a couple of days but the mix was a little too damp!) 

A selection of the finished product