Chocolate Milk Soap

My latest soap making experiment has now been named Chocolate Milk Soap. I was intrigued by the Creamy Cow Milk Soap on the Soap Queen where the soap is brought to a thick trace and is then 'plopped' with a spoon into the mould and thought I would give it a go.

Now before I forget, the colour of the soap has changed since I made it last week but not to the extent that it appears in the photos as some of them were taken in the laundry in the morning the day after the soap was made and the darker ones were taken the late afternoon in another room five days later.  Quite amazing really but that's photography for you about which I obviously need to learn a lot more.

The plan was to use cows milk as I normally use goats milk and to create a black and white soap by adding Titanium Dioxide to one half of the batch to whiten it and Activated Charcoal to the other half which hopefully would turn black.

Well, do you think I could get this soap to thick trace so that I could 'plop' it? Normally I have no problem doing that at all and I wondered if it was because I was using coconut oil instead of the usual copha. Whatever the reason I was getting concerned that I was going to burn out the motor on my old stick blender and decided to pour in the two colours instead of spooning it in. So into the bottom I poured a circle of black, then a circle of white beside it and another circle of black beside that making three circles all up and continued pouring the opposite colour into each circle until the mould was full. Black went on top of white then white on black and so on.

 
As I was using Dark Rich Chocolate fragrance oil which has a vanilla content of 15.9% which darkens soap I only added that to the jug containing the activated charcoal. Unfortunately the titanium dioxide didn't turn the soap as white as I had hoped although it was quite white in the first couple of days.

Then the mould was put into an esky for a few hours so that it wouldn't heat up too much as I don't have room in the fridge. When I had a peek I saw that the top had cracked so kept it in there for a while. The next day it was okay to take it out of the mould and I quite liked the black and white effect although the 'black' was really brown at that stage but it is darkening and, like I said, unfortunately the 'white' is now cream.

Before cutting though I had to fix that crack so sprayed the top with Isopropyl Alcohol (rubbing alcohol) which I bought from Jaycar Electronics, covered it with plastic and then did a bit of rubbing on the surface until the crack disappeared. I followed the instructions in the YouTube video How to fix a soap crack.

I left it for a while to dry and then the cutting began and I was quite surprised that it wasn't soft like my latest batches have been. The combination of lard, olive oil and coconut oil must have been responsible for that.

The dark part is almost black now....

...and the white is now cream but not as dark as these photos show. The smell is just lovely and I can imagine the menfolk emerging from the shower smelling like chocolate each night. LOL! They never complain so I am not sure they notice how nice they smell at times. Ha ha!

I had best write down the recipe before I lose it as I often come back to my blog posts to find out what I have put into a soap if it turns out to be a particularly good one. 

Chocolate Milk Soap

500g Lard
250g Coconut Oil
250g Olive Oil
140g Caustic Soda
330g Cows Milk in ice cubes
 31g  Dark Rich Chocolate Fragrance Oil added to one half of the batch
1t      Activated Charcoal mixed with water and added to one half of the batch
1t      Titanium Dioxide mixed with 50ml of the weighed oils and added to other half of the batch.

I am quite pleased with this batch and am keen to try it out to see what it feels like on the skin. It actually is already harder than the hot process soap I made a few weeks ago which had the same oils and lard in it but with the addition of sunflower oil so perhaps that made it a softer soap. 

If you are a beginner where soap making is concerned I wouldn't start off with a milk soap as there are a few extra precautions you have to take to keep the soap cool so it really is better to start with a simple soap. I know there were a few readers who said they wanted to make their first batch so I hope you have been brave enough to give it a try. Do tell :-)