Recipe VI – Cow’s Milk Soap
A brief visit to Soap Gallery, a specialty soap shop with a small workshop in Sutera Mall, brought about the realization that I now have access to lye, palm oil and other cheap carrier oils. This sparked another attempt at making cold process soap, which I haven’t done since 2 years ago.
With this attempt came purchases such as Pyrex measuring cups for creating an ice bath for the lye solution and base oils that used too be too expensive for a poor student. I even bought a soap stamp! This kind of expense was unthinkable just 2 years ago. To think back then I hesitated to even spend 40 bucks on safer glass containers and used grade 5 plastic containers to mix lye instead! I also only bought only the cheapest kind of base oil in the market (think coconut oil from the Indian mom and pop store) and was very stingy with essential oil usage. The world changes when you have an income.
Recipe VI – Coconut Milk Soap
Although I entered ‘Fractionated Coconut Oil’ and ‘Palm Oil’ into the lye calculator and applied the above recipe, on hindsight, a more accurate entry would be ’76 Deg Coconut Oil’ and ‘Red Palm Butter’. The Pyrex measuring cups were awesome and the battery operated hand whisk (from Daiso, a steal at 2 SGD) worked like a charm.
Despite the above, the outcome was the strangest I ever got. The vivid orange soap, no doubt colored by unrefined palm, seemed to trace normally and solidified after a couple of hours but even after 2 days, I was unable to unmold the soaps properly because the consistency of the back of the soaps was like soft Plasticine. The bits were left in the mold were so soft that I could shape them into balls. This is weird because Soapcalc tells me this soap will be very hard. I haven’t figured out what went wrong.
The red palm oil also seemed to have permanently colored my silicon mold orange, but this is besides the point.
These misshapen orange soaps are now sitting on my curing rack in my closet, which is now filled with the wonderful scent of lavender/spearmint/peppermint. Let’s see if it manages to harden after a couple of months.
Made soap yet again using the pure coconut oil and 20% superfat recipe, this time not with expensive and atas ‘vigin organic’ coconut oil but with the regular fractionated (I think) indian mom and pop store variety.
Also tried to be cheeky and formulated my soap after the tiger radler beer using some leftover kirin beer and the lemon essential oil I’ve been meaning to get rid of.
Recipe V – Radler Beer Soap
The result: promising looking bars which gelled nicely and are rock hard. They have a lovely frothy beer colour. I also ended up with injured hands.
As the coconut oil recipe the last time took a long time to trace, I decided to be a smart aleck and added an ingredient which I happen know, from the very first time I made soap, makes lye-oil mixture seize, in hope that saponification would speed up. The ingredient is finely ground oatmeal. I think it’s likely due to it catalysing the reaction via adsorption or something like that. Anyway to my delight trace immediately happened, and I was able to slop the contents into the mold, but not before getting some raw soap on my hands.
OWWWW.
Was reminded of pitting corrosion from my corrosion of materials module. corrosive substances seem to be able to remove small bits of skin and flesh from your hands once they are of sufficient concentration on your skin. It’s quite frightening and I still wonder why a few wounds 2 square millimeters large would hurt so much. I did the washing up close to tears of pain. Was reminded that I have to take responsibility for my own safety and wear gloves since I have stubbornly insisted on playing with an ostensibly banned substance in my country.
Can’t wait for this batch to cure.
The radler beer soap which has kirin beer in it
Made some soap using my simplest recipe thus far. It was a break from studying so I finished this batch in a record time of 40min without fussing around too much. Threw in the entire jar of my most expensive base oil so far and dumped in whatever lavender essential oil I had left.
Recipe IV – Basic White
The result: soap which turned out pure white and rock hard.
Batch no. 4
In retrospect, Batch no. 1 and 2 were nice, hard and bubbly but left skin squeaky clean. Batch no. 3 was more moisturizing with okay lather but was so soft that if you apply sufficient load when it is wet, it deforms like plasticine. This recipe was supposed to be super hard, super bubbly super cleansing but with lousy moisturizing powers but as I superfatted 20%… we’ll see how it goes.
Third try, this time with fairprice house brand macadamia nut oil. Determined to succeed in development of an extra moisturising soap recipe without the need to buy expensive oils like apricot kernel oil, shea butter or cocoa butter.
Recipe III – Earl Grey Milk Tea
The coconut milk was mixed in after all the lye pellets had dissolved in the earl grey tea while the container was immersed in cold water. Stirred the lumps out but the mixture stilled formed a dirty brown suspension of lye-tea and coagulated milk bits.
After combining the lye-tea-milk with the oils, which by then had formed a dirty brown mixture of lye-tea-milk-oils, I had to whisk like there was no tomorrow. Almost thought it won’t trace and I had just wasted 41g of lye (which is worth its weight in gold around here), but eventually it did and I could pour it into the mold.
Since trace took awhile to arrive and, being the dumbass I was, I misjudged trace and poured in the essential oils and tea leaves too early. Most of the essential oils have probably dissipated in the hot mixture which explains why this batch was not as fragrant as the second batch. Despite this it did retain its smell of tea, which I hope will stick around.
Unmolded them the next day to find the soap had lightened in color somewhat to a nice milk chocolate color. The soaps are also softer and more crumbly as compared to the last recipe, probably due to the use of macadamia nut oil. Sadly, I couldn’t achieve perfect square shaped bars yet again, but I have 2 more tries left.
Earl Grey Milk Tea Soaps
Wrapped the oatmeal soaps today in tempura paper with mt tapes.
Technically, the traditional cure time of 8 weeks hasn’t passed, but since I had done a large water discount and the soaps had passed the skin test done on myself.. Should be okay la hor. For some strange reason the oatmeal soaps were sweating today, which I pray is due to the humidity in the air after all that rain this morning and not due to some recipe design flaw.
Kudos to that little soap shop in malacca which gave me the idea of using soap mesh bags which completely revolutionized the way I look at soap bars. Was wondering why the soap mesh bag hasn’t quite caught on, especially when most people, when questioned, would list ‘lack of lather’ as one of the reasons as to why they do not use solid soaps. Soap mesh bags would probably help to produce decent foaming action even with the slimiest of castile (pure olive oil) soaps.
I guess everyone just didn’t bother after detergent was invented.
思い知った as to how useful mt tapes are
The other day in the shower, I was thinking about what the ‘best’ size of a bar of soap should be, based on my tiny grip and the fact that it’ll be in one of my hand sewn soap mesh bags. Was lovingly turning a bar round and round in my palm and came up with a hypothesis that a perfect bar for my grip would be a rather long cuboid, of dimensions about 9cm x 4cm x 4cm.
Then I realised that was the approximate size of a :X
tsk tsk.
And then i tried again, this time with baby’s extra pair of hands. Was determined to be able to recognise trace when i see it.
Recipe II – Lavender and Peppermint
The lavender buds wouldn’t grind into a nice powder, all we could do was to reduce it to a small mess of fibre. Perhaps we won’t grind them and leave them whole next time. The soaps manage to unmold properly this time after about 24 hours except for one which crumbled in my hands. But so far so good. And oh must I add that they smell wonderful as well?
Curing on my rack
Made my first 500g batch of cold process soap today.
Recipe I – Oatmeal
Not too sure if it will succeed or not. Based on readings online the soap will trace after an hour of stirring or so but mine traced in a grand total of 3 minutes. And i wasn’t even using a stick blender, just me and my cocktail whisk. Figured out that those people who complained about long stirring times were working on 10kg batches, not 500g ones. Plus the quick trace might have been because i geh kiang and did a water discount on my very first try.
Only managed to get the ground oatmeal in and a few hurried drops of lemon essential oil before I had to scrape the rapidly hardening stuff into my molds. It was still hot from saponification and had a consistency of cement and boy was I sweating like a pig after doing so. Furthermore I belatedly realised that the molds had 50g cavities and not 100g as previously thought, so had to dump the remaining 200g worth of soap into a silicone container from daiso. Which wasn’t so bad actually, judging that it didn’t melt when it came into contact with the caustic mixture.
The essential oils were also driving me crazy when I was hurrying to get them out when the mixture traced. Essential oils come in small bottles with rubber teats that cannot be removed and with a hole too small for my glass dropper to go in. I have no idea how to pour the oils out properly except to shake it frantically like a salt and pepper shaker. Gotta sort that one out, and to remember to prepare them in a carrier oil beforehand.
The result: yellowish pre-cured soap with visible bits of oatmeal that smells more like coconut than lemon.
Let’s see how it goes.
Base Oils and soaping equipment
Hardening soap in the cavity mold and in the silicone pot
Unmolded it the next day and this is what i got. Not perfect squares and a little crumbly because of its consistency when it was unceremoniously jammed into the molds, but ohwells. i guess i have lots to learn, and I wont stop trying until my lye batch runs out 🙂
Curing the semi failed soaps
Soapmaking sure is fun, but M&P is most definitely too boring for me.
Am trying to move on to cold process soaps but our government regulates rather strictly movement of chemicals like lye, so i haven’t been able to get my hands on any. Annoyed but also glad that not just anyone can buy stuff that can explode over here.
The hardening soaps have been the cause of pepperminty smells slowly taking over my room for which i am pretty grateful. i am biased towards essential oils like peppermint and spearmint and anything else i buy would probably to complement these two. Like the lemon essential oil i swiped today. Or the cocoa butter i’m eyeing once i find something in my budget.
Oh i still haven’t gotten my lye. I’m such a crazy lass.
M&P clear soap base with peppermint EO and leaves (which bleed)
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