Since we have a customer who wants several rustic soaps, we have been making soap using the HP method. It's not as polished or as smooth as CP soap, but in this case it's just what the customer wants.
One of the scents she requested is our Honey Almond Oatmeal soap. In our soaping career we've made it twice, both times using CP. Since we need it quickly, Alison and I took a huge leap of soaping faith and decided to try it using HP; surely the soaping gods would smile on us!
One of the scents she requested is our Honey Almond Oatmeal soap. In our soaping career we've made it twice, both times using CP. Since we need it quickly, Alison and I took a huge leap of soaping faith and decided to try it using HP; surely the soaping gods would smile on us!
The oils for this soap are olive, coconut, sweet almond, avocado, and Castor. As honey is in the name of the soap, we add several ounces of pure local honey thinned with water (so it will mix into the soap more easily and evenly). We also ground up some whole almonds with distilled water, then strained out the almond bits leaving just the liquid, thus creating our own almond milk. Both the honey and the almond milk are essential ingredients in the soap as well as colloidal oatmeal which we ground to a powder form and will add to the soap for exfoliation.
The original recipe called for Clove Bud, Sweet Orange and Eucalyptus EO's; however, due to an extremely low flash point for the sweet orange, we can't use it for HP soaping. We also discovered - oops - we were pretty much out of clove bud oil. Being resourceful, we decided to make this batch using the remaining clove bud oil (about a half teaspoon) mixed with our Oatmeal and Honey FO (which has a pleasant almond scent), for good measure we added a touch of eucalyptus oil.
We started out melting the oils in the crock pot then slowly mixed the lye/water in. Since the honey/water will add extra heat from the sugar during the saponification process, we have to add it in slowly and not use the stick blender right off the bat.
Batter before we started mixing with stick blender. So far we had only used a spoon, no emulsification yet.
After the first fifteen minutes we took off the lid and found this (above)! The oils had separated and the batter didn't look very good at all. We mixed like crazy to get the batter back together. At this point we had our doubts.
After the second fifteen minutes we were dismayed to see this. Ugh! The soap batter didn't look like anything we'd seen before, so we just kept on mixing, and mixing, and mixing (oh, our fingers were crossed, not sure if it will help).
After an hour we could smell oatmeal cooking and the soap looked a little better. It was not quite what we are used to, but it wasn't separating quite so much either. We did not uncross our fingers yet.
You can't see the actual bubbles, but take our word for it, the batter was bubbling around the outer edges. Yep, fingers still crossed!
Finally, after almost two hours the soap was holding together, and we could see cooked soap on the inside of the crock. I think we finally uncrossed our fingers at this point...things were looking up.
After more stirring and a few prayers, we started using PH strips. The one on the far right is the first one; it's really blue (not good). The middle one and the left are the last two we did; the color is right but we did the zap test just to be sure.
Once the scents were completely blended we put the soap into the mold over a layer of bubble wrap for a "honeycomb" effect on the surface of the soap.
We used the "spoon and plop" method - very scientific! Once we had all the soap in the mold, we tamped it several times (quite forcefully) to get rid of air bubbles.
Once again our lovely hand model Alison began cleaning up and noticed the smooth, creamy lather we had from the finished soap.
We tried putting the bubble wrap on the top of the soap but the soap was still too warm to be between two layers of plastic, so we scrapped that idea and will leave the bottom as our "honeycomb". We put the dividers into the mold and set it aside to cure overnight; we will unmold it on Friday.
Our Honey Almond Oatmeal soap. It smells great.
Our "honeycomb" effect on the bottom. If you look very closely you can see where we tried putting the bubble wrap on the top, use your imagination.
We feel our crossed fingers really helped this soap. Actually, the constant stirring didn't hurt either. It's quite nice and smells great, and if you look closely you can see the oatmeal.
Each bar of Honey Almond Oatmeal soap weighs about 5 ounces, and
they will be ready in a week.
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