First Milk Soap

It wasn't long after i whipped up the watermelon/anise soap, that Meghan and i were back in the kitchen! This time around we decided to try our hands at making a milk soap (well actually a heavy cream soap).

We had some time to kill while we waited for our cream to turn to slush, so we thought what better time to try another batch!? Meghan LOVES the scent of lemongrass and i just so happened to have some lemongrass essential oil. We also found some poppy-seeds in my bag of tricks and thought the two were an obvious combination.

By now we were becoming seasoned pros at getting our ingredients together and to the proper temperatures. It wasn't long before our lemony delight was poured into the mold.

This is what it looked like when i cut the loaf the next day.

I love how creamy this soap looks! And it smells amazing! The essential oils certainly have a lot more punch than the fragrance oils do. I am very excited to hop in the shower with this one.

Once we finished up this batch we realized we were running low on supplies so we piled into the car to go grab some fresh ingredients. I had been reading online that it was relatively easy to buy lye in the hardware store... apparently only in the US. We were not able to find any pure lye drain crystals, so for now it looks like the soap store is our only source. We picked up what we needed and then headed for home.

By now our cream was nice and slushy and ready to go. Chocolate seemed like a natural fit for this soap. It's a very light scent with just cocoa powder and little bit of white cake fragrance oil. We thought the cocoa powder would double as a chocolatey smell as well as color. Once it was poured it smelled like chocolate cake batter! Mmmm! Over all i was really impressed with how well we did with our first milk soap. I think, in time, our skills in dealing with this ingredient will only improve, and i am looking forward to creating new combinations and trying out coconut milk, as well. The milk in this batch almost looked like it curdled a little bit once it mixed with the lye. You can see tiny little white specs. I tried to look up why that happened, it doesn't look like it's lye spots, just little bits of milk solids. I think it happened from the lye solution getting too hot, so next time we will work on keeping it a bit cooler.

I could not wait to use this chocolatey soap so i hopped into the shower with a bar, the other day. Smells great, has a nice lather.... but i think we made a bit of a whoops! Too much cocoa powder! On the upside, using this bar of soap makes you look like you've got an awesome tan! We will have to cut back on cocoa next time.