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Apparently, soapmakers have chocolate on the brain! Marie posted her lovely Chocolate & Roses Valentine’s soap and Modern Soapmaking has on her website a Chocolate Covered Strawberry soap made with cocoa powder, ground cacao nibs, and strawberry purée. I think I just swooned! I am definitely adding to my to-do list making a chocolate soap!
Have any of you ever made soap with chocolate? Marie’s bars look yummy enough to eat!
I’ve an entire room for soap. At the start of the dry season, I make soap almost daily for a month or so, and on off… usually off… for a few more months making speciality soaps.
I sell some, a lot of people pay me to make a slab or loaf of soap for them. Here, everything has white skin chemicals in it foreigners don’t have an option to opt out of even whiter skin.
Oh my goodness! I think I just thought of the perfect soap. Three quarters coloured with cocoa powder and a wee smidge of brown and red oxide for warmth, and one quarter coloured with pink or red mica. Swirled or layered, it would look like Marie’s, but have the benefits of strawberries on the skin! And use yoghurt as the liquid? Holy beejeebers! What an amazing bar of soap!
I love yogurt in soap! I make soap off and on, whenever the mood strikes or we are running low…..which never happens because I love making soap! Haha! Bars of soap make great gifts. I love, love, love handmade soap!
I’m impressed! A room just for soap! Wowsa! I just have a few shelves in my laundry room.
Can I just have chocolate? Today has been crazy. But I admit chocolate soap sounds amazing. This is why I need to learn to soap. I’m so missing out on the fun. I feel like pouting and stomping my feet.
One thing I’m curious on- since chocolate has vanillin, will the colour change even darker in time? Or will the colours remain about the same since it’s being coloured for chocolate?
I know vanilla darkens soap, so it makes sense that the vanillin in cocoa would do the same thing. But, I really don’t know for sure, not having soaped with cocoa. I’m wondering if the cocoa would be an accelerant. I really hate accelerants in soap! I’ve had a lot of trouble with this my last few batches.
*blinks* um, how do we stop this accelerating thing? I’m feeling that once it happens to me, I will be yelling, loudly. And what the doozy is ricing?
See, I now have people I can ask this stuff!
The first time I had acceleration was when I made a soap with oat milk and oat extract. I had my four different containers ready with beautiful teal, pink, yellow and white colorants which I was going to swirl in a slab mold. Soap batter divided, colored, and then I added the fragrance oil…..I literally had four measuring cup shaped soaps within seconds! I smooshed it in the mold best as I could and hoped for the best. It actually ended up looking pretty, just not the way I wanted it to. And I swore up and down I’d never buy that FO again. Well, the scent is wonderful, so I will buy it again. I just won’t plan on any complicated swirling.
Ricing, as best as I understand it, is when something in your recipe, I think a fragrance oil, binds with some of your soaping oils and creates what looks like rice in the soap batter. You can blend it out, but blending will make your batter thicker, which is hard to use for designs other than layering. Soaping really is a hands on learning experience. You can learn up to a point by reading and watching videos, but you have to experience it to really learn it. You have to be prepared for anything. Believe me, you can have every ingredient researched, the temperatures perfect, the perfect mix of oils and butters, and the soap gremlins will still get you! I just try to go into it with the thought that I have a plan, but the plan could change at a moment’s notice.
Oh, and there is no stopping acceleration once it starts. Watch some YouTube videos on it. It’s nice knowing that people who are waaaaay better and more experienced than I am still get acceleration. I don’t feel so alone. *sniff, sniff*😢
That’s not fair. If I’ve prepped everything, I should be good. Evil persnickety soaping.
Ricing bad. Acceleration Bad. We want gel phase. That’s good. No morphing.
Unless gel phase gets too hot, then you have volcano-ing….or your soap splitting down the middle ….make sure you have room in your freezer for your mold if you make a milk soap. They get hot!
Watch lots of videos, read lots and experiment.
At the end of the day, everyone soaps the way they do from experimenting. You’re not going to get the butterfly swirl your first time, maybe not even your second or third time…. but you’ll get there.
I let my soaps do what they must do. If they gel, they gel. If they don’t get, they don’t.
Some oils, waxes and butters bring your soap batter to trace wicked fast, and some take forever. All the literature talks about how making coconut sea salt soap (1:1 oils to salt) so I used 80% coconut oil, 20% shea butter and 1.2kg Himalayan salt +liquid (frozen coconut cream). EVERYONE went on about how it could come to trace lickidy split so work quick quick! Yeah. I’ve made that same recipe about ten times over the years and every single time. It takes FOREVER to come to trace.
If you are just starting out soaping, start with small batches.
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