Homemade Bath Fizzers

Homemade bath fizzers make a great gift and are so easy to make that even children can do them! 

I made these for my boyfriend's Secret Santa at work. The gift-swap is across the whole company, not just his department, and the woman who organised it decided that the Secret Santa gifts should have a homemade theme. Which is quite unusual given that the company is a private equity firm in the City -  unsurprisingly several of my boyfriend's colleagues didn't bother with anything homemade! I decided this would be a good opportunity to make something however, and realised that edible goods wouldn't keep very long so bath fizzers might be better. I packaged them in a large glass jar from House of Fraser that was half price in a pre-Christmas sale, so the recipient can re-use the jar after the bath fizzers have gone.

I found a couple of different methods online for how to make these; one way involved using citric acid, which you can buy online but I didn't think would arrive in time, so I used the other method, which just uses bicarb of soda and cream of tartar, and it does work!

You need:

2 cups bicarb of soda

1 cup cream of tartar

2tbsp olive oil

food colouring- I recommend Sugarflair powder colours (dusting powder or lustre dust)

a few drops of essential oils (I used rosewood and lavender)

You also need a spray bottle and a silicon mould such as for individual cakes or ice cubes. 

Mix the bicarb of soda and cream of tartar in a bowl, then mix in the olive oil.

I tried out a couple of options for the colouring. Powder colours are a lot better than liquid as you don't want the mixture to react with water at this stage. I bought a small tube of pink edible lustre dust from Sainsbury's and added the entire 7.5g tube and it barely turned the mixture more than a very faint shade of pink - it still looked pretty white. I then found some Sugarflair edible lustre dust in my cake decorating cupboard and added a tiny amount, and the whole mixture took on a lovely pink colour. I know this is not down to the combination of both powders as I made two batches, and coloured the second batch only with Sugarflair lustre dust, and it worked much better than the Sainsbury's one.

You can of course use any colour you want.

I bought two bottles of essential oil from Holland & Barrett as they had a 'buy one, get one half price' offer. These are not cheap - around £7 a bottle - but you only need a few drops so it does go a long way. Now I just need to think of something else to use them for!

I chose rosewood and lavendar, partly as I had pink and purple lustre dust I could use for the bath fizzers but also because they are quite nice, bathroom-y smells.

Mix a few drops of the essential oil into the mixture and then spray with water. You don't want to add too much water at once or the mixture will start to react, so a spray bottle is ideal. I did find I had to use several sprays but you can decide for yourself, as you mix it in by hand as you go. You want to get the mixture to a state that resembles damp sand - so you can pack it into a ball and press your thumb into it to leave an indent without it all crumbling apart.

Pack the mixture into silicon moulds. I had two silicon cake moulds of different shapes which worked really well, and meant the bath fizzers were a decent size. I did see a few websites suggesting that you use ice cube moulds but I think these would be too small.

Leave them like this for a few hours or overnight.

Carefully push your bath fizzers out of the silicon moulds - these are rock solid and turned out a lot better than I was expecting!

I obviously had to try one of these out in the bath before giving them as a gift. So I dropped one into a hot bath...

... it began to fizz....

... and dissolved leaving a cloud of pink water, just like a 'proper' bath fizzer. You could definitely smell the rose oil as well. Perfect!

I carefully placed these into a glass jar and wrapped it up for the Secret Santa. I hope the recipient liked it!