Thursday, March 12, 2015

More Soap Experiments

A long while back, on a whim, I ordered a block of cocoa butter to use in soap.   It came.   It smelled divine.  

Creamy white chocolate heaven.  I left it on the table for 4 months just so I could smell it.

Eventually I hunted down a recipe for cocoa butter soap and tried a batch.   Fail.  

I had used crio grounds from our favorite winter drink [Vega Real and Cavalla are my faves].  Even though I used the dried, unused grounds and added them after trace, they soaked up the alkali and never saponified, so that batch of finished soap had tiny pockets of lye everywhere the grounds were.   Weird.  Caustic.   I pitched the whole batch. 

So this time we left out the crio grounds and used cocoa powder to color the soap instead.   Worked just fine.   We made some beautiful soap that is very hard.  [That's one of the characteristics of cocoa butter.]

Notice the lighter centers?    I have no idea what did that.   We'll see if it stays that way over time. 
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