Soaping Disaster Take II - Heeeelp ....

Hi there,

I am so disappointed... retried my banana and rice milk recipe last week and my soap ended with a pond of oil at the top of the bar. Have let it cure and its been two weeks now : the bar is very crumbly. Just don't know what happened : the only thing i did differently was to semi-freeze the banana ricey milk and add it to my coconut oil. Was a bit of a mess because completely forgot the hard oil effect.... anyways thought i'd saved the day when i added the lye but hey ho ....nope! :???:

Next time i'll add the lye to the freezed banana ricey milk and see how it goes... would that be the solution???


Yesterday, wanted to try a new recipe for a moringa & honey bar : still used my 100% coco 20% superfat recipe as a base ( and 2:1 ratio of water to lye). I reduced the amount of coco oil to add a bit of black seed cumin oil (1%), added 15g of moringa powder to my water that i chilled before adding the lye. All went well but it took more time than usual to get a light trace ..this is when I added 25g of honey.

Ended up with that oily pond on top of the loaf again!:headbanging: Don't know what is the issue ( both bars are unscented)!!! Took out the excess oil, and cut it after a couple of hours..

Photos below! My brain needs an explanation before i attempt these two recipes again...( or any other new recipe for that matter).

25grams of honey? Was that for a single loaf amount of soap? Could be overheating.

This thread on various things that can go wrong with soap (with excellent pictures!) might help (and is worth a read regardless):
http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=52097

While you are experimenting, it helps to make just one change at a time, to a recipe you have got to work consistently well. It saves time, effort and money in the long run.

Your soap is overheating and the biggest problem is when it creates caverns inside with leaking oil. Not knowing your batch size that could have been a lot of honey which will really heat up and a high CO soap will get hot. I find honey heats up much hotter and faster than adding sugar to soap. Bananas contain a lot of natural sugars which also cause overheating. If you insulated these soaps you would compound the problem, so these types of soaps you do not want to insulate. I recommend de-molding the honey one in a container to catch the leaking oil, because I am betting you will have to re-batch it, with the looks of the outside. If the inside of the honey soap is okay the oil will usually re-absorb, but only time will tell. Let in stay in the mold a couple of days

Thanks SaltedFig and cmzaha ... this would explain that then! overheating ....i've never rebatched soap so will have to look into it seriously and urgently !

Noted : one experimentation at a time .... hopefully the banana one will make the third try!

Both loaf were of 1000g.... As for the honey,looks like I was heavy handed. Just did a rough search ( should've done this before...!) : recommended amount 1tspoon per 500g roughly - which means less than half of what I added!

Thanks again!