The first multi-oil honey soap I made didn’t cure well, so I was a little worried about buying even more ingredients to try another complex recipe. Still, it’s a great moisturizing soap, even if we go through a bar in two days because it’s so soft even after 2 months of cure time. This time, I used a recipe from another book, The Beeswax Workshop, and the soap already looks better from a soap perspective, but you can clearly see that I need to make an adjustment to my process!
The soap on the right is one of the first I poured. At that point, the soap was the consistency of banana pudding and easy to get into the corners of the mold and smooth out the top. The soap on the left is from the last tray poured. In the five minutes between starting to mold the soap and molding the final batch, the soap became more like tofu! I squished the soap down with my spatula. I thumped the mold down onto the counter. I pushed down with the plastic ruler I use level the tops/bottoms, but it just didn’t let itself be manipulated.
This recipe produced about twice as much soap as the other recipes I’ve made, so I think the easiest solution will be to reduce the recipe. I am waiting until tomorrow to unmold all of the soaps and I’m hoping that the first two trays (12 bars) all look like the good one above. If they do, cutting the recipe in half would probably work well. My other option is to use my wooden soap mold for half of the recipe and cut that into bars. I have time to think about that as I will let this soap cure before making a second batch. I do like my soap molds, but making twice as much soap and only cleaning up once is good too!
The failed recipe will probably be the next one I retry. The ingredients were very similar, but the process was different. Soaps that include honey become very hot, very quickly and prolonged high heat can damage some of the ingredients. Many of my resources recommend preventing honey and beeswax soaps from entering gel phase by refrigerating or freezing them. Yesterday’s soap recipe said to place the soap in the freezer for 24 hours. The other soap recipe recommended insulating the soap to hold the heat in. I’m going to try that recipe again, but not insulate it and maybe even freeze it.
Just like any other imperfect attempts, the tofu-look soaps won’t go to waste, especially as this is a new recipe and we’ll use it for a couple of weeks before giving some to friends and family to try. Only after that will we put it on sale. While no-one has had a negative reaction to anything we make, we’ll keep testing every batch of soap and doing our multi-step testing of new recipes.
Lazer Creek Apiary 