The Great Bath Fizz Disaster

I did a poll on Facebook and asked if you guys wanted me to test easy skirts or bath fizzes, and you overwhelmingly picked easy skirts. Well, too fucking bad because I didn’t have any elastic. Womp womp. Bath fizzes it is.

I actually figured this would be really easy and there would be no possible way I could crap it up, so I bought, like, actual products and stuff. I bought citric acid and one of those silicon ice cube tray thingies, just like the instructions said to, guys, so high was my optimism.

So, fine, I admit I didn’t have “pure cane sugar.” I had a mostly-used really old bag of powdered sugar, labeled with a sharpie lest I forget what the unidentified white powder in the unmarked bag was. That was seriously the only sugar in the house. I’m actually sort of proud of that fact.

I mixed up all the dry ingredients. So far, so good. Yeah, bitches. I’m on a roll.

And then I mixed up the colored water in an old Febreeze bottle, because I don’t keep travel-sized spray bottles around for the express purpose of following instructions from crafts on MarthaStewart.com. Jesus, sorry.

I’m really glad no one happened upon me working in the kitchen at this point, because I had a big tub of non-descript white powder and a spray bottle of something suspiciously resembling blood. I can come up with no story that would make any sense of these two things, but then, I don’t watch Breaking Bad either and I suspect therein might lie the answer.

Now, the instructions explicitly warned against spraying so much colored water onto the white powder that the powder began to fizz. Well, goddamnit, mine fizzed immediately, no matter how little water I sprayed on it. I didn’t figure it was that big of a deal, so I kept spraying and letting it fizz and mixing it all together, and spraying some more, repeat et cetera.

I would come to find that this was a very bad idea, but for the moment, I was convinced that I had something mildly workable.

I began packing nice-smelling pink powder (because I added lavender oil to it) into my little ice cube tray, and at first, all seemed to be well. I decided that since I had some extra powder, I would make penis shapes out of it. (I mean, duh, right?) But when I turned from packing the powder into my penis cookie cutters (what? you don’t have penis cookie cutters?), I found that my fizzes had begun to … fizz.

Oh dear. So that’s why Martha politely insisted that I wasn’t supposed to make it fizz when I was mixing it. Well, fuck me.

I thought maybe my penis-shaped ones would survive, since they were bigger pieces and I only filled them halfway, leaving room for expansion…

But by the time I went to bed, it looked like this:

I will not lie: At this point, I actually still thought I might be able to save the project, so I squished the fizzy fizzes down and back into their moulds and hoped for the best.

Alas, when I awoke, I found this carnage in my kitchen, hardened in a brick-like mass:

[Please insert penis jokes here. Heh, insert. I’ll get you started: Well I expect penises to harden and THEN fizz, but not fizz and then harden. Get it? Get it?]

At this point, I gave up on the bath fizzes being any good and my husband suggested that I should just throw the whole thing away, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my penis cookie cutters. (Who would be?)

So I filled up the sink with warm water and dumped everything in, and it all dissolved immediately and I retrieved my penises. Whew. Crisis averted.

The lesson here is clear, I think. If you’re going to fail at something, it’s much better if the results are water-soluble.