Review: The Body Shop Spiced Vanilla Bubble Bath and Body Butter

Last week I went shopping for some present for my best friend, Eline, and as I still had a 5 euro voucher for The Body Shop, I decided to also buy a little 'present' for myself. After smelling different projects and thinking which I like best I decided to go for the Spiced Vanilla Bubble Bath and the Spiced Vanilla Body Butter. The Spiced Vanilla range was a limited winter range, and the products were on sale. At the moment most shops are selling the last few products from this range, but I still would like to review these products because I was dissappointed by one and surprised by the other.

 First of all, the Spiced Vanilla Bubble Bath. I actually wanted to buy the shower gel, but they did not have it anymore, so I decided to go for the Bubble Bath. I also needed a new bath product, and I love foamy baths, so I though this would be a great product for me. The product promises a bath full of bubbles, so I tried it out right away. But what a disappointment. When I added some of the product, which has the consistency of a shower gel, to the bath while the tap was on, I already saw very little happening. I thought I was adding too little, so I added some more. The Bubble Bath created a very thin foamy/bubbly layer on the water, but nothing more. This foamy layer also dissolved very quickly, so that I was left with just water with the fragrance of Spiced Vanilla. Speaking about the fragrance, I have no complaints about that! I think it is really nice so I decided to use the product as a shower gel, and using my puff sponge it becomes quite foamy.

Then the Body Butter from the same range. I was pleasantly surprised by this product. I really need to start using body butter more often, but I am usually too lazy to spend time 'buttering' my whole body in the morning. However, this one smells great and I just have to use it! It works just like any other body butter, but the smell is what makes it special. Spiced Vanilla greatly describes the fragrance of both the Body Butter and the Bubble Bath. Personally I do not have dry skin, but I think this would be a great product for people with dry skin because it is really like butter and it melts in to your skin quite well.

Because of the disappointment with the Spiced Vanilla Bubble Bath I probably will not buy a product like this at The Body Shop again. However, I do really like the body butter and I would really like to recommend it to you. You may still be able to find it in a The Body Shop, but it is not sold online anymore, unfortunately.

What do you think of these products and The Body Shop in general?

Loes

Cookies!

I baked these cookies yesterday, and they turned out really nice. It was the first time I tried baking cookies with 2 colours, but they look and taste really nice!

Here is the recipe:

Chocolate-vanilla spirals

I got 27 cookies (of which some didn't turn out perfect) out of this recipe, eventhough the book says 36.

Ingredients
225 g butter, soft
115 g fine sugar
325 g flour, plus some extra
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Instructions
1. Prepare 2 baking trays. Mix the butter and sugar untill you have a light mixture. Take half of this mixture and put it in a different bowl, and mix 150 g flour and the cocoa powder through it. Stir the vanilla essence through the other half of the mixture and use a siff to add 175 g flour to this. Make a dough out of both mixtures.
2. Prepare your working area with some flour, so your dough doesn't stick. Rol out both pieces of dough to form rectangles of approximately 20 x 28 cm. Put the chocolate dough on a sheet of baking paper and put the vanilla dough on top of it. Carefully roll up the dough from the long side, using the baking paper as a help. Wrap the dough in the baking paper and leave it in the refridgerator for at least 1 hour, so it can get stiff.
3. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius/gas oven setting 4. Take the dough out of the baking paper and cut slices from it. Put the cookies onto the baking trays and bake them for 10 - 15 minutes, untill they are gold-brownish. Leave the cookies to cool for 2 minutes and then put them on a tray to cool down further.

Enjoy!

I translated this recipe from the book 'Bakken - de beste recepten uit de hele wereld' written by Lisa Scargo.