Even if it's not something you wanted to learn!
So I finally made my Brown Windsor Soap today. The essential oils I used were caraway, clove, thyme, cassia, pettigrain, and lavender, equal amounts of each. I used beer for my liquid, and because of that, soaped pretty cool (about 80 degrees F). And I wanted to make a nice, masculine black streak through it.
That sucker accelerated like it was determined to win first place in the race to Be Soap. I was mixing my black in part of my raw soap, and I glanced back at the majority of the raw soap still in the pot. I've been making soap long enough to recognize an attempt to be Soap On A Stick when I see it!
So, much mad scrambling later, I got the stuff in the molds. (I was using a 12-bar silicone mold I got from WSP, plus two smaller molds, either Mold Market or Milky Way.) I just left it sitting on the table, waiting for it to firm up enough to move back to the curing shelves.
It was also generating more heat that I expected. Even the two smaller molds were pretty warm to the touch when I went to move them. And the surface of the big mold (which is a slab mold) was really odd - it was like the soap had a crust on it, which cracked when I tried to move the mold. Finally got a cookie sheet, turned it upside down, and slid the mold straight onto it, then just set mold, sheet, and all on the shelf.
I'm not really sure what made it accelerate like that. I know cloves can, but I've used clove before and never had a problem. Perhaps cloves, in combination with the other EOs, brought out the worst in each other. And the beer, with the sugar, got really hot really fast, which I'm sure would have driven the saponification faster than usual.
So I figure I've got three factors to deal with:
Beer
EO combination
Color
If I want the soap to look the way I originally envisioned, I need to use water instead of beer. If I want to use beer, I need to not try to add color. I also have a slightly different recipe for the Brown Windsor EO blend, which has bergamot instead of thyme. Don't know if that will make a difference or not. I have to use
some form of that EO blend, otherwise it won't be Brown Windsor.
I may try this again at a later date, although I'm terribly curious to see what it looks like cut. Assuming things don't go even more wrong, and stuff starts separating out.
I didn't even go near it with the stick blender - I just barely got the beer/lye mixture incorporated with the oils and I could tell it was galloping towards trace.
Chalk this one up to experience!
Anita
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