We’re coming up on Easter and that means filling plastic eggs with goodies for our kids to hunt. But my husband and I are not too thrilled with the idea of just giving our kids a ton of sugar for each holiday, so we always look for some alternative ideas for them to get goodies that are not all sweet. Through a roundabout way I came across a recipe for homemade bath bombs. My friend, Laura, from Heavenly Homemakers, found it first, but instead of making bath bombs, she made tootsie pop bombs for her boys Valentine Party. I went back to the original idea and decided to make some Easter Egg Bath Bombs.
The directions at Skip to my Lou are great to follow, but it can be hard to find the citric acid. I went to my local Walmart, because, hey, that’s what we’ve got in small town Nebraska and I don’t like paying shipping fees if I can help it. When I got there, I could not find “citric acid” but fortunately I had looked it up before I went to the store and I knew to look in the canning and preserving sections, both in general merchandise and in grocery. The product I found was called Fruit Fresh, and it is right next to the Pectin. It is a non-gelatinous fruit preservative. Among other ingredients, it has citric acid in it.
I also made two changes to the directions at StmL. Instead of massage oil, since I was making this for my kids, I went to the baby section and got myself a bottle of baby oil. And instead of a two-part, plastic ball, I got 12 large, plastic Easter eggs to make my bath bombs in.
My Recipe:
16 oz baking soda
5 oz Fruit Fresh
4 teaspoons baby oil
fine mist spray bottle of water
Mix the baking soda and Fruit Fresh very well, then stir in the baby oil. Once well blended, spriz water onto the mix until it clumps easily when squeezed in your hand. Pack into the plastic eggs, and close. Hide in grass, trees, bushes, and Tonka Trucks for your kids to find.
The baby oil substitution worked great. But the plastic eggs, not so great. I was unable to remove the finished bath bombs from the eggs and to get the two halves to stick together. So this means there will be another slight modification. When the kids want to use their bath bombs we can either open the eggs and use one half at a time, thereby increasing the number of bath bombs to 24, or we can try dropping the bath bombs, eggs and all, into the bath tub. Since there are 2 – 3 little holes at each end of the egg, we should be able to achieve fizziness, and possibly prolong the fizzies. We will see.
When it came to quantities, I was able to fill 5 eggs with one batch of the mix. So to make all 12 eggs, it took 3 batches of mix, and then I had enough leftover to fill the 3 empty Fruit Fresh bottles for my own use.
Here is the cost breakdown for my egg bombs.
Great Value Baking Soda (16 oz) – $0.54 * 3 boxes = $1.62
Ball’s Fruit Fresh (5 oz) – $3.58 * 3 bottles = $10.74
Equate Baby Oil – $2.47
6 large plastic eggs – $0.97 * 2 = $1.94
Total Cost – $16.77
The cost is a little deceptive as there was quite a bit more baby oil in the bottle than was needed for this project and I had a lot of fizzy mix leftover.
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