Vanilla Hazelnut Rebatch

Yesterday I rebatched the Vanilla Hazelnut with PKO soap I made a couple weeks ago.  I hadn't put in enough fragrance, and I had forgotten the ground hazelnuts and oatmeal.  And since I'm out of lye, I didn't have any other soapy thing to do--except work on my Good Manufacturing Practices documents.  And I wanted to make soap.

Since this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, I didn't have a pint of whipping cream on hand to use.  So I used a pint of Creamy Select Vanilla.  I'm lactose intolerant and can't drink a lot of milk.  So I use a milk substitute: Creamy Select.  I'ts made from milk, but has the lactose replaced with dextrose.

Friday night I made some up some extra thick Creamy Select (using twice as much powder as usual), mixed it with the grated soap, and set it aside to soften the soap.  Saturday morning I put it all in the crock pot to melt down.

The soap melted down nicely and when it was ready I added more Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance and some ground hazelnuts and oatmeal.  Then I poured it into my mold.

This morning I unmolded the soap.  I was very happy that there are no air pockets in this loap.  But it was still very soft--too soft to use the mitre box to cut it as I usually do.  I was impatient and cut a few slices anyway.  I didn't cut them very well without the miterbox.

I squished the slices I'd cut into soap patties and used my cookie stamps to decorate the tops.  The soap was so sticky that it was sticking to the ceramic cookie stamps, and the designs looked horrible.

Then I remembered something I saw in a Soap Queen TV video on youtube.  In one of the videos, Anne Marie mentioned using cyclomethicone as a mold release when using plastic molds with cold process soap, because cyclomethicone would not saponify as oil would.    I decided to try it on my stamps.

I poured a little cyclomethicone into a small dish and dabbed it onto the teapot stamp using a pastry brush. Then I pressed the stamp into a soap pattie.  Oh my goodness.  It worked so well!  The detail was awesome.  I quickly tried the heart-and-flowers stamp, which is more detailed than the teapot stamp.  It turned out awesome, too.  I've never before seen this much detail when I used this stamp.

I was having so much fun I ended up squishing half the loaf into soap patties!  But I'll leave the other half to harden up and then I'll use the mitre box to cut them into nice slices.

Cutting the Vanilla Hazelnut with PKO

I cut the Vanilla Hazelnut soap into slices.  Overall, I'm pleased with the results, although there's certainly room for improvement.  But before we talk about the cut soap, let's look at soap patties.

I like to cut the soap when it's still soft enough to mush into patties; I usually make 2 or 3 per batch.  A lot of people like to make soap balls. But I find balls hard to use in the shower.  You know how you twirl a bar of soap around in your hands to work up a good lather?  It's hard to do that with a ball of soap--it's to slippery and too round.  But a patty is flatter and easier to twirl.  I also like to press a design into them with a cookie press.

As you can see by looking at the side of the loaf after I took it out of the mold, I'm still getting lots of air pockets.  It's because the soap is so thick when I get it into the mold.  The good news is that the top was thick enough that it didn't flatten out when the soap gelled.

Air pockets aren't as noticeable in the cut bars.  The bottom brown and white layers are still not as deep as I'd like, but they aren't bad.  A little more work on them and they'll be perfect!  

I really like how the white top is piled up in the middle on this slice.  That didn't happen on all of them, depending on where I cut compared to the swirled top.

I like how the cocoa looks on the top of the bars.  But you can only barely see the cocoa line, and only in places.  I obviously didn't get it thick enough.  But at least the bars won't break in half because the line was too thick!

Ruth likes the Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance I used; he can't stop sniffing them.  Yes, I know "Ruth" is a strange name for a male dragon.  I named him "Snowball".  But after I read The White Dragon to the dragons, he wouldn't answer to anything but "Ruth".  So, "Ruth" it is!

I really need better lighting.  I've seen instructions for making a light box.  Guess I'd better make one.

You can see that not all the tops are as nice as the one earlier.  I really like how the swirled tops look in the mold, but I like the more "mounded in the middle" look once the soap is sliced.  So next time I'll try that approach.  Maybe I can swirl it up into mounds, or something.

Heliotrope really likes to ham it up for the camera!  He's always trying to climb on the soap when I'm taking pictures.  So I just snapped his picture.  I think Heliotrope would make a cave out of the soap if he could!

Vanilla Hazelnut Soap with PKO

I just finished making a new batch of Vanilla Hazelnut soap, and I just realized I forgot to put the ground hazelnuts and oatmeal into it.  Drat!

I used palm kernel oil (PKO) this time instead of coconut oil, because I wanted to make soap for some friends who are allergic to coconuts.  PKO and coconut  are the two oils that produce the most lather.  So if coconut oil is out, PKO is in!

The Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance oil is a very well behaved oil:  no acceleration, no seizing, no ricing. So I normally have plenty of time to do decorative techniques.  In fact, I usually have to wait for the soap to set up enough to do them!  But this time was different.

PKO sets up much faster than coconut oil.  At least, it did for me today.  Things thickened up really fast.

Like most vanilla fragrance oils, Vanilla Hazelnut turns soap brown.  I like to use this to my advantage, and leave some soap un-scented--and therefore un-brown.  Then I can swirl the white and brown together, or do layers, or whatever.

Today I decided to do a layer of brown (darkened still more with a bit of cocoa), a cocoa line*, a layer of white (whitened still more with a bit if titanium dioxide), another layer of brown, and a swirled white top with a bit of cocoa and glitter sprinkled on top.  I did all that, but it was really getting thick.  The final layer of white looked like whipped shortening--it was that thick.  But I got it on there, and swirled it in, and sprinkled the cocoa and glitter on top.  The cocoa and glitter actually look good together.

The soap in now in a warm oven, saponifying its heart out.

I'll have pictures of cut soap later.  But for now, there's just a picture of the soap in the mold before it went into the oven.  Too bad you can't see the glitter in the picture.

*A cocoa line is made using a thin layer of cocoa in the soap.  Pour a layer of soap, sprinkle some cocoa over it, then pour soap over the cocoa.  When you cut the bars, you can see a thin dark line across them.

If you use too much cocoa the two layers of soap don't adhere to each other and the soap can break there.  If you don't use enough, it's hard to see the line.

A cocoa line is a form of pencil line, which can be made with pretty much any powdered colorant:  colored clay, mica, ultramarine.