I’m fairly certain that I tipped my hand regarding my love of beverage-inspired soaps with Latté, Gin & Tonic, and Chai Latté soaps. Surely we all knew hot chocolate soap was right around the corner. And how right we were. This lovely, dark bar looks downright edible, though it is sadly missing those teensy little marshmallows. It’s also the first of my 2013 Christmas soaps! Already? Yup.
The subtle scent comes from all over—high quality cocoa powder, vanilla flecks, cocoa absolute, and vanilla essential oil. The base is whole milk and coffee, lending a creamy, deeply nuanced base to the bar. Dark rhassoul and French Red clay boost the bar’s slip and cleansing power, while contributing to the final colour. I’ll forgive you if you want to eat the bars, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Hot Chocolate Soap
40% olive oil (pomace) (USA / Canada)
25% refined coconut oil (USA / Canada)
20% lard or beef tallow
10% avocado oil
5% castor oil (USA / Canada)Superfat at 5 or 6%
Per 500g (1.1lbs) oils:
- 2 tsp whole milk powder
- 2 tsp instant coffee granules
- 1 tbsp cocoa powder
- 2 tsp vanilla flecks
- 2 tsp rhassoul clay (or other brownish clay)
- 2 tsp French red clay (or other ruddy reddish clay)
- 5g cocoa absoloute
- 10g vanilla 10-fold essential oil
Follow standard soap making procedure. Once you reach trace, add all the powders, clays, and essential oils. Pour into mould.
Let saponify for 24 hours, slice, and let age at least 3 weeks. Enjoy!
There’s not much I love more than the smell of raw cocoa powder. I have tried ordering cocoa absolute before though and it didn’t turn out well. The smell reminded me of rankly sweet Hersey’s syrup. It was on my skin and I had to smell it for hours afterwards. Ugh.
That’s all to say I REALLY want to find a cocoa absolute that smells like the raw cocoa powder in my cupboard. Does what you are using smell like that, and if so, which company are you buying it from?
Thanks!
The funny/annoying thing about absolutes is that they generally smell awful in their undiluted, or even semi-diluted form. Mine smells almost a bit fishy when it’s not sufficiently diluted. However, when it is, it’s quite lovely. I got mine from NDA, but they are discontinuing it soon, so if you want some, grab it ASAP.
Just a quick question for you…. but why wouldn’t you want to put cocoa butter in a chocolate scented soap? I know when I put cocoa butter in my soaps, I still get a chocolatey scent when I use my bars and since this is a chocolate scented soap… I am just curious why you wouldn’t use it.
Thanks
g
I didn’t include cocoa butter because I’ve never had much luck with the scent coming through (I can never smell the individual oils in a bar of soap), and it’s a pretty expensive ingredient for soap making. If you’ve had luck with it, though, go for it—I’d use it to replace the avocado oil.
I loves me some cocoa absolute that stuff is amazing. Your soap looks good enough to eat!
Mmmmm, cocoa 😀 My boyfriend says the same thing about my soaps—I’m pretty sure he’s managed to resist the temptation (so far, at least).
I make a dark chocolate cappuccino soap.
That sounds delicious!
This sounds so good! I will be trying this one out.
Have you used tea soap? It so soft and gentle on your skin. But, when and how would I add it to my recipe? Would you just use dry ground tea to the recipe?
Also, so you test your soap with ph strips, if so when do you test it?
You are so awesome with all this DIY stuff and love every thing that you post. I always get the itch to create things in my kitchen during fall weather.
Cheers from Montana,
Janelle
I’ve made & used tea soap before. It’s super easy to make—just use brewed tea instead of water. The tea will turn a gross colour when you add the lye, but it goes back during saponification. I wouldn’t recommend using ground tea unless you want the soap to be a bit gritty, which can definitely be nice, just something to plan for 🙂 (Also, be careful with how much you use… I’ve definitely made a few batches of far-too-gritty soap, haha).
I never test my soaps’ pH, though I will whenever I get around to making liquid soap. The first time I made a batch of CP soap I did the “zap” test (lick your finger, touch the soap, lick your finger again—if it “zaps” you did it wrong). I’ve never had any troubles with it!
Thanks for reading and joining me in my virtual DIY kitchen 🙂 Have fun with your DIY adventures and always feel free to get in touch with any more questions.
Great looking soap Marie! Next to your G&T soap, I have to make this as soon as my supplies from Saffire Blue arrive
BTW- the cocoa absolute is pretty expensive, any alternatives for this ingredient?
Re Saffire Blue: I swear I only wanted to order dark cocoa butter…but I ended up spending well over $100! ^_^
Hey Kristen! So… cocoa scent is kind of a pain. It smells sooooo good, but there is no essential oil. So, the places to get cocoa scent are cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and cocoa absolute. I’ve never had much luck getting the scents of cocoa butter or cocoa powder to come through in soap (though another reader says cocoa butter has worked for her). So, that leaves cocoa absolute. The brilliant thing about absoloutes is that they are soooo strong that you really don’t need much of them. That said, if it’s still too pricey, I’d just ditch it. Not everything needs to be super fragrant.
I just discovered your blog and I’m really enjoying it! 🙂
Awesome, thanks Silvia! 😀
I would love to make this recipe for a shampoo bar but I have white hair! I love my white hair and have earned every single one of them! What would you suggest for a good shampoo bar for me since I am not a brunette? (Darn)!
Any of my citrus ones would be just lovely—I love this poppyseed bar 🙂 You could also make this soap without the cocoa powder & you’d be set!
I hope to try this in the next week or so. What does “superfat at 5 or 6%” mean? The percentages add up to 100% so are you referring to the castor oil?
Thanks!
–David
Awesome! So, superfat can also be called “lye discount”. Basically, it’s ensuring there isn’t quite enough lye in the soap to turn all the fat into soap, meaning some of the fat will be left as fat in the finished bars, making the bars more moisturizing. It also gives you a nice buffer zone so there’s no way you’ll end up with excess lye in your final product (ouch!). It’s super easy to calculate—your soap calculator will ask you for your superfat percentage, and that’s where you enter either 5% or 6%, telling the calculcator to leave out 5 or 6% of the lye so 5 or 6% of the fats in the soap will stay fats 🙂 I love Soap Calc! Hope that helped & feel free to ask away if it didn’t 😛
Looks fab! What if any of this could be tweaked to be used with melt and pour?
I don’t see why you couldn’t, but I don’t have any M&P experience, so I can’t say for sure. I’d start by just adding all the non-oil ingredients (the clay, cocoa, etc.) to the melted base, and then pout & let set. Let me know if you try it!
I have to tell you, I made this soap a couple days ago, but had no cocoa absolute, lard, tallow, castor oil, or avocado oil. I know, I probably shouldn’t have bothered, but I was so anxious to make it, I made due and used olive oil, coconut oil, and cocoa butter. Oh, and I didn’t have instant coffee either, so I used a small amount of coffee essential oil.
Holy smokes! Does it ever look and smell like a rich, delicious chocolate cake! We’ll see how it works after it cures, but all I can say right now is that it is GORGEOUS and smells delicious! Thanks for your great, creative recipes and ideas here! I can’t wait to give it to my family for Christmas presents!
Ooooh lovely! I should warn you that the soap without castor oil will probably not be very lathery, but otherwise rather lovely from the sounds of it 🙂 Let me know how it is after it cures, it sounds awesome!
Actually, white soap, chopped into small cubes, would be a great addition for ‘marshmallows’.
This is an awesome idea! I’ll have to try it if I ever make this soap again 🙂
So fun! Thanks for sharing. We love hot chocolate ideas 🙂 We put a link to this on our Facebook page, hope that’s OK. https://www.facebook.com/HotChocolateBliss
Thanks so much for the share, it’s much appreciated!
After weeks of reading all the soap recipes, and getting over a slight tinge of jealousy because of your soap box, I shared my ultimate diy gift making dream to my hubby and he surprised me for Christmas with a beautiful hand crafted box. I think I even let out a geeky shriek when I lined it with parchment paper and saw how well it fit in. ^_^
So I put it to use. My first ever attempt at soap making (I only splashed a little soapy lye on myself so I’d say it’s a win). *yay for vinegar*
This has to be the perfect present for my chocolate loving mom. This, the cocoa lip balm (which is AWESOME!) and the whipped body butter (next on my list). However, they may now become a belated gift cause I think I did something wrong. I wasn’t sure I had enough ingredients so I adjusted the oils down to total 250g, then went to the lye calculator, figured out the water & lye ratio, and adjusted all the powders, clays and eo’s by half.
Olive oil – 100g, Coconut oil – 62.5g, Tallow – 50g, Avocado Oil – 25g, Castor Oil – 12.5g, then the came to Lye 34.5g (6% fat), Water – 82.5g to Yield about 367g. Does that seem right? I ran it twice on two different websites, however I’m beginning to think it was a user error 🙂 I mixed to trace, then I added the extras and poured into the mold. *sigh* I should have noticed that I did something wrong when the finished product smelled more like olive oil/tallow than it did chocolate. I let it sit 24 hours hoping it’d somehow fix itself 😛 but I wasn’t so lucky.
Was it okay to add the cocoa absolute when it was 100 degree or should I have waited till it was room temperature? Is it possible to remelt the soap back down and add more absolute? Or should I scrap it, start over and keep the oils at 500 grams? What would happen if I added additional cocoa powder/coffee/vanilla? Too many questions from a ingredient hoarding newbie? 😉
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, the soap I cut today LOOKS like brownies & what I washed off my knife left my hands clean smelling. Thankfully not like tallow (grin), but definitely no chocolate smell coming through. I’ve used the absolute in the lip balm and it’s ah-mazing so I can’t imagine it being the quality of ingredients. Maybe, just not enough? Any salvaging tips would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance 🙂
Oooooh! How exciting! Your very own perfect soap box 🙂 And your very first batch of soap! The amounts all sound correct, even for the absolute. I find cocoa absolute really is more of a “base” note, and mine didn’t really come out very strongly in this soap, either (though I was much more stingy with my cocoa absolute than what I call for in this recipe). The scent is there, but only in a hot shower or bath, where the heat & moisture bring it to the surface. If you want to intensify the scent, I’d go with things that compliment chocolate nicely (like coffee and vanilla), and that are cheaper than cocoa absolute! You can use more, by all means, but… pricey. You can also drop/rub a bit of the absolute onto the cut bars when they are still rather new and soft for the bars to absorb—that’s probably the easiest thing to do now 🙂 Enjoy the bars—but don’t eat them 😛
So I’m just finding this now. I stressed out over them for 48 hours and ended up melting them down (which was a pain) added more vanilla, coffee and a tad more absolute. Plopped the blob of chocolate looking porridge into the soap box & prayed. 😛 In the mean time I made grapefruit calendula bars incase my first set batch of soap didn’t turn out… and while weighing out the eo’s I realized I must have been stingy on my cocoa absolute as well :} As in REALLY stingy. So, lesson learned. Trust the scale & toss out high school math. On the upside, my mom LOVES both the bars, the lip balms, and whipped body butter. I think I just upped my status to favorite child. 😉 For that I must say Thank You!
It sounds like you ended up with a good solution and some fantastic bars of soap—yay! And it sounds like you’re all set for Mother’s Day as well 😉
What is vanilla flecks?
They’re basically ground up vanilla bean pods 🙂 You can get them here.
My kids and I attempted a version of this today. The changes I made was that I used less % of tallow and subbed the excess + the avocado oil for cocoa butter to attempt to get more of the chocolatey scent since I didn’t have absolute. I also split the batch and used kaolin clay with regular cocoa in half, and then did the red clay plus dark cocoa in the other half and swirled them together. I wish I would have read the comment about the white soap bits for marshmallows. I could have done that! But, I guess on second thought it’s probably good I didn’t because it was a scented soap too and may not have mixed well at all. So – note to self…make a white unscented soap and use little bits for marshmallows in the future. 🙂
It seemed to take longer for this to come to trace than other of the soaps we’ve made in the last week. I’m really not sure why as everything else was the same. But it was still quite liquid when we poured it in. I’ll need to give it some extra time to set before cutting I think. I’ll let you know how it turns out in a month or so.
Oooh, it sounds like you did a beautiful job 🙂 The slow trace may have been due to a colder soaping temperature, or to the lower percentage of tallow. I’ve been playing with a recipe that uses 2x as much tallow as I usually use, and I’m amazed at how quickly it traces compared to my usual recipe, so I imagine a reduction would have the opposite effect. I can’t wait to hear how it turned out!
Ok. I have read and read about making soap. 5 or 6% superfat….. so here is my question.
What does superfat really mean? I want lather…. does a higher % give you more or less lather. Is a lower % harder and more drying to skin..
Help. I can’t find any information on this area…just technical mumbo jumbo.
Hi Sue! I give a good overview of what superfat is in my entry on “Why There is No Such Thing as Making Soap Without Lye“.
Hey, what can I use instead off tallow, I don’t want to use animal products.
Thanks you! Xxx
Hi Gem! I’ve written on article on why I use tallow and lard in my soaps and the alternatives 🙂
I absolutely love this soap recipe and am excited to make it but I was wondering if there are any alternatives for the vanilla flecks?
Hi Courtney! If you don’t have them you can just leave them out 🙂
I’m confused… What differentiates absolute cocoa from just basic cocoa? Is it just the smell? Could I use plain, run of the mill, already-in-the-kitchen cocoa instead?
Hi Beth! They are actually totally different things—cocoa powder/kitchen cocoa is a powder, but cocoa absolute is basically the solvent-extracted essential oil of the cocoa bean. They do totally different things here—the powder adds colour and a bit of scrubby grit, whereas the cocoa absolute brings the actual cocoa scent to the table (the slight cocoa scent of cocoa powder doesn’t survive saponification). So no, please don’t use cocoa powder instead of the absolute 🙂
Wonderful looking soap, but will it stain and have a light tan lather?
I’ve never experienced any staining, but yes, the lather is a bit brown.
Hello from England.
Thanks for the inspiration, Marie.
I just made this soap, but added some cocoa nibs and a tiny amount of double cream (what you call heavy cream, I think). I used raw cacao powder instead of cocoa, and also grated a little solid cacao ‘cos I had it. I subbed the vanilla for a little vanilla paste.
It smells heavenly. My dog is going bonkers sniffing the air. As am I. Can’t wait for tomorrow to see what it looks like. Thanks again.
Hi Merle! Your variation sounds utterly decadent 🙂 Thanks so much for DIYing with me!