But I really needed to try to make some by myself.....just to prove I could really....and because I'd deliberately saved the cappings wax from this year's harvest...
For the record, cappings wax is the finest wax the bees produce each year - it comes from the honey containing cells, the bees havent had much chance to walk over it so its the cleanest,freshest wax in the hive...
I know they don't exactly look like much but hang with me here.....there's a bit of a process it needs to go through first...
Better gather the kit together to do that...
(Yup thats a packet of nappy liners, I'll get to them pretty quickly)
It needs a bit of a wash ...to rinse out excess drips of honey...
Then its a case of melting and filtering.....this is where the slow cooker and nappy liners come in. (There's a sentence I never thought I'd type)
With a bowl to catch the drips in carefully positioned in the slow cooker below....
The wax sitting in a nest of muslin and nappy liners....
Its a case of lid on and slowly warm.......
And in a matter of a few minutes the kitchen smells warm and yummy and beeswaxy....and the wax has disappeared through the nappy liner filter....
And underneath is a lovely pool of pure melted bees wax...
Which cools slowly into a lovely perfect disc...
Right now....time to gather the other ingredients...Cocoa butter and sunflower oil...
So I'll just grate that beeswax and crumble the cocoa butter together...
No ...no that really isn't cheddar cheese, and when I said crumble the cocoa butter I meant attack with large kitchen knife ..NEVER has a product been so misnamed!!
Then its just a case of stirring in the sunflower oil and warming it through...
Then the fiddly bit....
Filling the lip balm pots without flooding the kitchen side (good job I remembered the newspaper!)....
And there you have it!
15 little pots of home made scrummy lip balm, and the kitchen smells DELICIOUS!!!
.....Nearly better than my hands!
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