I forgot my soap in the oven....

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Guspuppy

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The other day I did the Clyde Slide pour for this month's challenge, cut it 12 hours later. All the bars looked the same. This morning I went into the basement to look at them, and to my surprise there was a tiny circle of partial gel in two of the inside bars (only 4 bars total from 1-lb mold) The gelled parts were so much brighter that I wanted to force-gel the whole thing. I saw someone (DeeAnna?) had said you can OP your soap after the fact by simply putting the cut bars back into the mold and putting them in a warm oven like normal. Well, I did that but I turned the oven on to 'warm' and went outside to hang laundry, promptly forgetting ALLLLL about my soap. I just now remembered, and it has been in the turned-on oven for hours! So here's my question: should I leave it to cool in the oven like usual, or take it out? I'm sure it's well and truly warmed through by now!
 
I would let it cool at least some. Depends on your recipe but once it's completely cooled after that amount of time in the oven, it's possible it would be fairly hard and you could get a little fracturing at the bottoms of your cuts. If you cut it while it's just barely warm, you shouldn't have any issues.
 
update: Forcing gel worked, the colors pop so much better now! However, being in the oven so long did funny things to the soap. Just the exterior where it touched the silicone mold - kind of bubbled up or cratered in, I'm assuming the excess amount of heat made parts of it it shrink faster than if it was left to cure normally. And it did melt the bars back together a tiny bit, I had to re-cut them but along the same lines and it didn't seem to mar the cut any. Thanks again for everyone's help!
 
And this reminds me of the time I cpop'ed 2 batches and forgot they were in the oven cooling.. then turned my oven on to preheat for dinner... cooked soap anyone? in the end dinner didn't get made that night and my soap ended with a pretty cool texture on top where it had "baked"..
 
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