How To Rebatch MAN Soap

If you find soap uninteresting, please discontinue reading, I don’t want to waste your time ;)

 

Seriously, we LOVE hand-milled soap. Jessie and I think from now on, this will be our standard process. It turns out a much higher quality, harder bar of soap that is in no way affected by the amount of botanicals and scents added, whereas it can mess up a fresh batch of soap and make it unstable. Utterly fool-proof in the crockpot.

Check out our Green Herbs Baby Soap…

 

We started with 40oz of a basic castile soap base(a little palm thrown in) I made in Nov, well cured and ready to use.

 

3oz of Plantain and Chickweed infused oil and 1/2 C crushed dried plantain added. It made a thick clumpy soap that I had to press into the mold with a wooden spoon, much like thick mashed potatoes.

 

A beautiful hand-milled herbal bar of the softest, gentlest baby soap you will adore. No messing with lye, no 6-8 weeks curing period(because it has a cured soap base)…absolute fabulous.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Then comes our MAN soap. My husband loves using my soap, but I have heard subtle comments like “I wish you could make manly soap, instead of that smelly girly stuff” O.k., he’s rather blunt. ;) So I started looking around for what I could put together for him. I found a recipe for a Spiced Oat Bar.

 

We prepared the molds and grated 40 oz of Junie’s goat milk soap.

 

Jacob put 2 cups of oats in the Magic Bullet and added 4T of cinnamon, 2 T allspice and 2 T nutmeg to make an oatmeal spice dust. Along with rosemary and clove EO.

 

We heated 20 oz of water to 180 degrees in the crockpot.

 

I dumped the shaved soap on top of the water, placed on the lid and set the timer for 10m.

 

Then, we gently folded the soap into the water and set the timer for another 10m.

I left the crockpot on high. When I came back, it was entering the gel phase. I folded it much more this time and set the timer for 5m.

 

Wallah! Now we had a full gel phase. It was clear and gel-like. We gently folded it some more, little stirring is key to keep it from foaming. 

 

Then we added the botanicals and EO’s…and stirred…

 

and folded……

 

and folded some more, until all was mixed in a very thick, hot mess. It made the whole house smell heavenly!

We scooped it into the mold, tapped and pressed the bubbles out and textured the top.

It looked chocolaty and not “spiced oat bar”ish so we pressed some whole sliced oats in the top. Unfortunately, this made it really appealing to my toddlers so I had to hide it quickly. 24 hours later, this is what we cut! 

                  Scrumptious! Now I reeeeally need to keep it away from the little ones. Micah(5.5yrs) is still trying to convince me that he should take a bite just to prove it tastes yucky like Mamma says.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Last soap story. Promise. This is our Goat Milk Wake-up Rosemary that we made for the upcoming Soap Swap(read below). The pressure was on as I want my amateur soap to be worth some other soapers while. This was a fresh CP batch, not rebatched. AND first attempt at swirling! It was Jessie’s idea to add the merlot for a snazzy zip, I was just going to do a green swirl.

It was really fun because Jess and I pretended we were teaching Keepers, timing a mock class run through. It took us 40 minutes of giggles and goofs to finish a batch and teach our *class*. We will get more efficient. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

FYI for any fellow Soapers, there is a Soap Swap that you can sign up for. It takes place in May(barely enough time to cure your bars! but she said you can send them uncured, just with a note on the date they can be used) on The Soap Queen blog. You make 12 bars of either HP, CP or M&P, mail them in and they will swap and mail you back 12 bars from other soapers! Jess and I took a leap of faith, ordered our scents from Brambleberry and committed. Hmmmmm…..we’ll see. We cut the bars in 48 hours.