I was so pleased with the outcome of the scented lavender soap, that I was excited to try another essential oil as well as incorporating some colour! I followed a recipe from the soap queen which had the following recipe:
- 280.66g coconut oil
- 280.66g olive oil
- 280.66g palm oil (responsibly and sustainably sourced)
- 93.55g rice bran oil
- 130.41g lye
- 306.17g distilled water
- 28.35g orange essential oil (I used 5 fold oil)
- white titanium dioxide powder
- paprika
Method
Added the lye into the water, mixed until dissolved, then allowed to cool to 130F. Weighed out and melted the solid oils (coconut and palm), then added the rice bran and olive oils. To prepare the colours, I mixed 3 teaspoons of powder with approx 3 tablespoons of olive oil (each power separately!). Once the oils and lye solution were both at 130F (recipe slightly higher temp than normal), the lye was added into the oils and blended until a light trace was reached. I then poured around 500ml of the soap 'batter' into a separate container and mixed in the paprika to colour it, then the orange essential oil after the colour was mixed. In the original pot I added in the white titanium dioxide and mixed. I used a spoon to mix in the colours and oil as I was worried about the better getting too thick too quickly if I used the stick blender. I then poured the orange coloured batter into the white in 4 places - this was done from quite high so that it would get deeper into the white batter.
To create the swirl, I used a skewer and mixed the orange and white in a circular motion. The original post said to do this only once, but I ignored this as once didn't look enough (I should have listened perhaps!). The soap batter was getting quite thick by this point and I was worried it would get too thick if I took much longer! Finally I poured most of it into a silicone loaf mould, and the rest into a cylindrical pipe mould which I lined with acetate paper for easy removal.
Results!
I removed the soap from the moulds after around 30 hours. The silcone mould is great! The soap loaf just peel away easily from this. The acetate sheet stuck a little more than I hoped to the soap, but it did allow easy removal from the pipe. When removing the acetate, it pull out small round bits which makes the soap look like there were air bubbles on the outside (but there wasn't!).
I was a little worried when I saw the large soap loaf out of the mould as it looked like the swirl was... well not very swirly! After cutting though, the swirls looks a lot better... but I think I still overdid it!
The soap smells of orange as I had hoped, but it is quite a sweet orange - a little like jaffa cakes! It is very nice, but certainly sweeter than I expected! The only problem I had was when mixing the titanium dioxide powder. It was very hard to remove all the lumps, and it seems that after cutting I wasn't as successful at this as I had hoped! It is probably not possible to see in the pictures, but on some of the bars there are white drag lines from where the knife has cut through some white colour that has not been mixed too well. I plan to invest in a small milk whisk and use this for pre-colour mixing next time!
For some reason I was quite stressed when following this recipe! Not because it was particularly hard to follow, but I think I was panicking about the batter getting too thick to work with after splitting it and adding colour etc. Anyway, it was quite stupid to get so stressed out and I must confess that my remedy of a gin and tonic (x2!) helped chill me out!
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