Hi! Sorry if I didn't respond sooner to all your questions - I worked Sunday night, didn't get home until past 10 Monday morning and was dead to the world until an hour ago.
I'm sorry that my recipe didn't work for you, Rhonda. And thank you for filling in for me answering questions, Jo! Okay, to answer everyone's questions. After trying out my (final) recipe at least 5 times before I shared with you all, there are several possible reasons I can think of why your soap didn't set up like mine, Rhonda. One is the salt like suggested by Jo. I tried using dead sea salt this morning and it was more oily and softer than even a plain M&P bar, I guess because of the potassium content of dead sea salts and dead sea salts just seem oilier somehow. I haven't tried epsom salts so can't say what a bar using it would be like. I tried sea salt and kosher salt and got the same milkshake consistency as with table salt, although the resulting bar was softer for the kosher salt. The other thing is, did you mix in the salt while the soap and bath butter mix was still hot? I should have mentioned in my original post that you want to wait until you can comfortably dip a finger in the mixture or hold the side of the container you have the mix in, otherwise your salt will melt and will take longer to set up or just remain soft overall. A possible solution to this would be to remelt your bars until semiliquid, then adding more salt. I can't say exactly how much salt you would need though, as it depends on the type of salt you used. If you can, keep adding salt (maybe 2-4 oz depending on the recipe size you used?) to the semiliquid mix and keep stirring gently until the resulting mix is the consistency of a thick milkshake and the salt is thoroughly dispersed throughout. The resulting new bars (hopefully) should be harder or set up better. The other possible factor is the soap base. Like I mentioned in my original post, I used BB's like-CP soap. If you used regular white soap base or shea soap base, then the glycerin content in the regular base and the shea butter in the second base might affect the results. To counterset this, you can try using only 3/4 the amount of foaming bath butter (3oz or 12oz depending on the recipe size you used) and replacing with the same amount soap base (5oz or 20oz depending on the recipe size you used) although I can't guarantee the results as I'm not able to try it out myself since I don't typically buy either base. I always use BB's like-CP bases in clear and white because of the humidity here in Hawaii or BB's shaving and goatsmilk bases, although I haven't tried making a goatsmilk salt bar because I ran out of goatsmilk base.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you still have problems, or if this solves the softness issue.
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