The recipe called for a bag of beeswax, a pot of boiling water, an empty can of fruit, and a bag of coffee beans/grounds. We poured over the recipe and grabbed all of the ingredients over the weekend. Once in hand, we boiled a pot of water, cleaned out the can of pears that we bought, and loaded the pellets of beeswax into the can (double broil basically). In no time at all, the wax melted down and become a liquid. I grabbed the can out of the pot and poured the newly formed liquid beeswax into the candle holder. The wife then grabbed the bag of the coffee grounds and poured it into it. We then realized that we only filled a quarter of the candle and it looked more awkward than we could have ever imagined.
Back to the drawing board!
We recreated the whole experiment, melted the wax down, poured in again over the old mixture to simply add to it and it turned out looking quite cool (picture above). Everything seemed as if it had succeeded with minimal hiccups! That was until we tried to light the candle. In seconds, the coffee grounds that we had mixed into the candle lit up like uncle Vinny's Christmas tree and the whole apartment started to smell like burnt hair.
Yuck!
Needless to say, it seems like our little experiment was a failure. But from failure comes success! We're going to be digging the old wax and coffee mixture from the candle holder and loading into into a Scentsy instead and see if it will work better as a mixture that is simply heated rather than burned. Hopefully it will turn out better than our initial try!
Question:
Anyone else attempted to make a beeswax candle? What did you mix into it that didn't try to burn the house down or smell rancid?
What a fun project, even though it seemed to have failed... You and your wife spent some quality time together and you have a great story to tell, to boot!
ReplyDeleteTake care
FerdiS, DivGro
Right you are, DivGro. It was a fun little night and it taught us one more way NOT to make a candle :). Looking at it from the bright side!
Delete