This year, after many years of saying, “we should make our own bath bombs,” I finally purchased the items needed. The friend who always said we should make them propmptly went to the hospital for a month, so I went on alone.
I tried using notmartha.org’s instructions. They were helpful to a point, and made more sense after I tried to make them once. The site references another recipe, Brenda Sharpe’s, which helped even more the second time.
Pictures! Prep:
You have to wear a mask, because the citric acid flies everywhere and burns your nose!
Here are my hints. Make smaller bath bombs. Hobby Lobby had many sizes of clear round ornament “molds”. The smaller the bomb, the less likely it was to melt under chemical reaction, or just instability. (I tried the 100mm, 80mm and 60mm sizes.) Three or four of the above perfect-looking bombs in the above picture “melted”. ASIDE: save the melted hard remains, and use it for yourself. The baths are perfectly satisfying, just not fizzy.
At the end I just had a sort of oozing mess, which I figured would crust, so I put them into little truffle holders:
Final pieces of advice: Give up on the perfectly round bombs. Use the correct proportion from the recipe, and then just mold the mix into half-bombs, cup cake pan indentations, or measuring cups. Give each bomb a few minutes to settle and react to form an outer “crust” and then lightly pop them out onto a pan with a towel above and below the bomb to dry. Keep these puppies covered for a day before packaging them.
Stefanie Japel from glampyre.com also made cocoa ones. She put them in star-shaped cupcake bins. I want to try that next.
