Entering a Bath & Body recipe by hand
Transcribing a recipe you already have — the same five product tiles as the wizard, and the checks the form runs while you type so Save never fails at the end.
Already have a recipe you trust — from a class, a supplier's sheet, your own notebook? Type it straight in. This path is for transcribing what you already have; when you want Ellie to invent something, that's the Bath & Body wizard.
From the Bath & Body recipes page, Enter manually sits beside New recipe. The by-hand path is only available in a Bath & Body workspace.
The same five tiles
Manual entry opens with the identical five product tiles the wizard uses — Melt & Pour, From-Scratch, Bath Bomb, Scrub, Lotion / Butter. That's deliberate: "Bath Bomb" must not mean one thing in the wizard and something else on the form.
Picking a tile takes you to the right form for that product. Choosing Melt & Pour carries your pick through, so you land on the form with M&P already selected rather than on a cold-process default with a lye gate in front of you. From-Scratch names two methods, so it carries none and you pick cp / hp / liquid on the form itself.
Pick from your pantry where you can
For oils, bases, scents, colorants and add-ins you can either pick from your pantry — which keeps the row linked to your stock — or type free text.
Heads up: free-text entries are labels. They don't feed cost, the lye math, dose calculations, or inventory tracking. Pick from your Bath & Body pantry whenever you can so the numbers work.
The checks that run while you type
The manual forms check a handful of things as you fill them in, rather than letting you finish and then refusing at Save. Each one is the same judgement the save door makes — the form never softens it, it just tells you earlier:
- Scent load must be inside the method's own ceiling.
- A bath bomb needs both an acid and a base in its dry mix — that's what makes it fizz.
- A scrub needs both a carrier oil and an exfoliant.
- A lotion needs an emulsifier — without one you have oil and water in a jar, not a lotion.
When one of these isn't met, the message names the section of the form that fixes it.
The gates still apply
Entering by hand doesn't skip anything. A from-scratch recipe still shows the lye acknowledgment with its computed lye and water weights before it saves, and a lotion still enforces its preservative floor. Both are computed from your entries in code, not taken on trust.
Save it
Once it's in, it's a full recipe: read it, remix it, take it to the bench, run a batch from it. This is the path to reach for when you're migrating recipes you already trust rather than starting from scratch.