hello everybody this is Ariane Arsenault from La Fille de la Mer, Handmade Soaps.
Today I want to show you something that sparked my interest a few months ago and
I've been juggling with the idea of creating a such a product for my own
personal use in my home and then to translate it into my business.
It is not a product that I invented myself, it's been around for at least 10 years
from the research that I was able to do, so what we're gonna be making today
is called in French "cake vaisselle" and I'm going to spell
it out for you right here if you want to google it and search on this topic.
I decided to translate its name to dish cake which is basically a solid dish
detergent to wash your dishes rather than using a liquid version in a plastic
bottle. This is also in the zero waste or minimal waste movement in mind and as I
am always thinking and trying to minimize my ecological footprint I
thought this was a wonderful idea and I really wanted to share it with you guys.
As I said this has been around for at least 10 years from what I could find.
I was not able to find who originally invented the name or the formula
or who created this product but I did find a lot of blogs mentioning and
referring to the initial recipe but that recipe has been removed since then. So I
don't know! You can do your own research there are many different variations on
this type of product. But basically they're all similar so the base
ingredient is sodium cocoyl isethionate noodles which is a biodegradable
surfactant which is derived from coconut so this is a naturally derived surfactant.
I get mine from Windy Point Soap in Calgary they're here in Canada
now there are other places you can buy it I guess, around in the world, but
this is just where i get mine because I'm Canadian. I've also seen a recipe
using sodium Coco sulphate which is also an eco cert
and Cosmo certified surfactant but I'm using sodium cocoyl isethionate today
because this is what I have the most in stock and it's a very gentle surfactant.
also we're gonna be needing some sodium carbonate now if you don't know what
sodium carbonate is it's also called washing soda and I actually made mine
from baking soda that I converted to washing soda. I'm not gonna teach you how to
do this today, you can buy your washing soda pre-made or you can learn about it
online and make your own. It's not that complicated. We are also going to use
distilled water, white vinegar and some essential oils, but those are optional.
You can put them in to add a nice scent to your final product or you can leave
them out if you prefer. Then we're gonna be using a "Bain Marie" I have no idea..
a double boiler! oh yeah that's how you say it in English! I have a hot water
bath and then a metal bowl sitting on top and this is on a hot surface
induction burner. Because sodium cocoyl isethionate can be really airborne
and when you handle it you're gonna be wearing a mask, gloves, an apron to
protect your clothing and we're gonna be packaging these into some fun and
practical and reusable mason jars. So when you're done with your solid dish cake
then you can reuse the jar for something else or make another one in it!
So without further due let's hop into the bowl! I will measure out my sodium
cocoyl isethionate you can use the noodle form that's what I have on hand, but you can
also use the powder form.
then I'm gonna add the distilled water and this will help to melt the
sodium cocoyl isethionate and you would really
want to do this with distilled water because you don't want anything to grow
in your product once it's done. Put all the chances on your side! And some
vinegar! The vinegar will help to give a nice shine to your dishes. So now I'm
gonna turn on my induction burner get this on a rolling boil and then put my
product on it and allow it to melt. I will go ahead and add my sodium carbonate
into my mix
I will stir it in now that my water is boiling. I'll be able to start melting
all of these ingredients together. Of course the sodium carbonate won't be
melting it's just going to be dispersing in the mix and what it does in here is
actually helps to remove the dirt from your pots and pans! You know it'll kind
of be a little bit of sandpaper action in there! Let's transfer this on the
double boiler
This will get rather hot and I have this little... it's not a mitten but it's like a
mitten. So I'm just gonna use it to prevent myself from burning my hands.
You could also use a heat mitten? I don't even know how to call these in English! We just
called them "Mitaines" in French "Mitaines à Four" so there you go! And I've
been making the solid shampoos for a long time now
and I've been wondering what else could I be doing with my sodium cocoyl isethionate
because I mean it lathers up so nice and it washes so well so I started
digging and that's how I actually discovered the solid dish cakes!
I'm just gonna keep on turning and waiting until the SCI noodles start to melt
they will take a little while so I'm just gonna be going back and forth
turning this around so that you know they evenly heat up and they will melt
but not to a complete liquid state they'll just kind of go to a mushy mashy
mashed potato paste kind of a texture and when it looks like a paste that's
when I'm gonna turn off the heat and then add in my essential oils and pack
these in the mason jars. With a little bit of time and patience and stirring
and some elbow grease you will get to a consistency that looks like this.
It kind of looks like mashed potatoes you can still see some of the
SCI noodles but that's ok most of them are melted now and this is when I will
turn off the heat. AAh! This little burner is very practical but it is a little noisy!
I'm just gonna remove this from the heat and put it on this surface
you're just gonna take my mitten yeah can't quite get it..
and careful... be very careful this is hot! Okay I have an infrared thermometer
and it's set in Celsius because I want to make sure that before I add my
essential oils that my mixture is cooled enough. Now out of these two essential
oils that I'm using today, tea tree is the one with the lowest flashpoint
being 47 Celsius so I want to make sure that I will add these essential oils
below 47 and we are now at 63 Celsius so we're gonna wait a little bit.
While everything is cooling down I'm gonna go ahead and prepare my essential oil blend.
The temperature is now okay to add the essential oils and I'm just gonna drizzle
and slowly mix them in just so that I don't get them splashing out of the bowl.
I'm just sort of folding them into the mix and it smells really good! I love the
scent of lemon and it is a grease fighter so it's a bonus to have it into
this product! Let's mix it all very well!
Let's switch side and start packing these into the mason jars. If you've been
watching my videos for a while you probably know how much I like to be
accurate and this is why I always fill my products on a scale. I'm just gonna
start filling the jars and here's what I do to get everything packed at the
bottom. I take something that's cushioning and I knock it down and I'm
just gonna keep packing until I have 250 grams.
okay let's move on to the next! What I do with the left overs from my bow is
that I wait until it hardens up and then I scrape it all out and I'm gonna
keep it in a little jar on the side just to wash some dishes over here so that I
don't waste any because there's still going to be plenty stuck to the bowl.
I save this and when it's gonna be dry I'm gonna scrape it with a metal
spoon and it'll kind of chip off and then I will get some powder detergent
for my own dishes here at the soap shop! So let's clean up the bowls and I'm
gonna show you the lids that we will be using on these. In this second bowl I
have our second solid dish cake and this one is the exact same recipe except the
blend of essential oils we are using in this one are mandarin, which is why this
is bright orange and lavender. As I said before, lemon has grease fighting
properties and so do have most of citruses! Mandarin smells absolutely
wonderful blended with the lavender. I find this really soothing and relaxing
so if you're gonna be washing dishes you may as well do it with
good smelling products! I'm using a clean damp rag and I'm just gonna go around
each jar and wipe off the excess just like so so we have a nice clean jar.
This way it'll be easier for me to put the cap on these. However because these
are still hot and they're still warm and soft we're gonna wait until they're
fully hardened before closing the lids.
Once these are fully dried there will be the lid that will be placed on top to
close these up and I've created a nice little label and that's called "cake vaisselle -
cake dish" lemon and tea tree. Of course my labels are bilinguals because
we are in Canada and everything needs to be in French and English. There are also
directions, the ingredients, the address of my soap shop and the weight of the product.
If you would like to be really eco friendly you can pair these
beautiful solid dish cakes with a loofah. So loofah of course you can take into
the shower and it makes it wonderful exfoliant but you can keep them as well
in your kitchen as they are wonderful scrubbers for pots and pans. They are
from a squash so fully organic matter that will compost or biodegrade
whenever you're done using it and it's too used up to be used in the kitchen.
These are really eco friendly as a matter of fact all of our
solid dish cakes come with a slice of loofah. Once you're done with your loofah
you will probably have some leftover dish cake because these will last up to
six months. Most natural health stores will carry loofah, sometimes you can find
them in drugstores so you can find them literally anywhere nearby where there's
a natural food store or something like that. Many soap makers
carry them so you can just grab another one. I would like to know if you
would be interested in buying these online because as of now they are only
available in our store here in the Magdalen Islands but if there is interest
I will leave a poll right up there and you can click yes or no, would you like
to buy these online! So that I know if there's interest I could actually add
them to our line of products!
I'm just taking all of the little bits and the little leftovers and
putting them into a smaller jar for my own personal use and then I'll take you
to the sink. just to show you how nicely this product
lathers up with water. As soon as the water hits the solid cake dish
it starts to foam and lather. There is more than just cleaning dishes that you
can do with the solid dish cake. You can basically take your scrubby and use
the solid dish cake to wash your countertops or ceramics and even your
stove tops because remember we did add some sodium carbonate to this
formula and so if your stove tops needs to be cleaned you can use this to scrub
off any dirt off! So that is really a product that is polyvalent, that has many uses and it's definitely good to keep
around the house! My stovetop is sparkling clean! Thank you so much for
joining me today in the making of this solid dish cake
I really hope you've enjoyed this video and if you would like to give these a try
I will leave a recipe down below in the description box as well as a few
other links to other recipes that I found online so you can try your own
you can try my recipe or my versions of it and you can hopefully read the French
blogs that I will link! Also there are so many ways to package these and
label them. Right now I'm just using mason jars because this is what
have but I'm working with a local ceramics artist and he will be making me
some containers out of pottery so that we can have a unique container that will
be something like a keepsake after using the solid dish cake. We will
have them in the two versions in the mason jars because of course the ceramic
dishes will be a little bit more expensive and this will be the like the
the basic model. So if you try them let me know! Tag me in social media
I'd really like to see your creations. I hope I got you inspired by the idea that I
borrowed from our cousins over on the other side of the ocean in Europe and I
will see you again very soon... oh my gosh! This is so noisy! There's like a
machinery that's blowing all the snow that we've had! So sorry about that!
I will see you guys very soon bye!