Any thoughts on why it overheated and cracked? I put it in the refrigerator for the first time ever..
Early on in my beginning soaping days, I put a soap or two in the fridge that cracked anyway, too. I always just put it down to an extraordinarily hot gel, but what the good Gent just said also makes a lot of sense to me.
mommycarlson said:
IrishLass,
Very interesting about adding the honey to the lye water. Have you ever added the honey when the lye water was warmer than room temp? I usually soap when lye and oils are 110-120 and wondered if I could add the honey at that temp?
I personally wouldn't add it to a warm solution. A cool room temp or even a cold solution is best, because it will heat your solution up. When I add the honey to my cool room temp solution, it heats it up to about 161F or so.
The first time I ever tried this method, I missed the part about making sure to add it to cooled-off lye solution and I actually added the honey to my entire batch amount of water and stirred well to dissolve it before adding in the lye......and promptly learned in a few nanoseconds to never, ever do that again.
Thankfully, the girl scout in me had the foresight to have used a tall pitcher three times as big as it needed to be and mixed it in the bathroom on the floor of the shower next to the drain, because it got really hot, hissed, spit and volcanoed to about 3" or so below the top of my container, and turned so dark that it looked black, but it really wasn't black- it was just a very dark shade of orange.
In spite of all that, though, I went ahead and used the solution anyway when it had cooled back down, and my soap actually came out perfectly fine. It went through full gel without any overheating or any other drama, and it came out of the mold smelling wonderfully of those Bit 'O Honey candies, and only discolored to a medium tan. It also didn't have any of those unsightly "weeping honey" spots that my previous batches of honey soap always seemed to come down with.
The next time I used the method, though, I learned about and heeded the advice to add it to already prepared & cooled-off lye solution, and things went much better, i.e., no hissing, spitting or volcanoing- only heat and discoloration of the lye solution to a dark burnt orange color.
For what it's worth, below is what the color of my fully gelled, finished honey soap looks like using the method of adding the honey to the cooled lye solution (by the way, the dripping honey you see is not real- it's just M&P soap that I poured into the 'honeycomb' cavities formed by my bubble-wrap liner):
IrishLass