Oatmeal, Milk & Honey Soap

It seems like every soaper out there does an 'OMH' soap. I think almost every fragrance provider has some kind of milk, honey or oatmeal combination scent haha! So yeah, it's popular.

I have an Oatmeal, Milk and Honey fragrance from Wholesale Supplies Plus. While I do agree with the majority of the reviewers that it is a really nice fragrance, I have to say that I also agree with the people who said it smells mainly of almond. I am fine with this because I like almond, but it's not really that milky-honey smelling. It does have a very low percentage of vanilla however, and I think that the discoloration could be overcome with kaolin and titanium dioxide. It was a very well behaved fragrance! It would give plenty of time for a more detailed design than I chose. It does seem like OMH soaps are usually fairly simple, letting their scent and additives take center stage. I decided to follow suit and keep it simple.

I did a little bit of layering (successfully!) in the Grapefruit Cutie soap when I layered more base color over the drop swirl, but had previously failed at spooning on distinct layers. Layers seemed like a new challenge that would also keep things simple.

Adding honey was another experiment/challenge. I have heard many stories about honey being a pain: overheating, discoloring, weeping out, etc. There are also a few ways and times that people add it. After research I decided to add 1 tablespoon (per pound of oil) at trace. To make it more fluid and easy to mix in I combined it with distilled water instead of heating the honey.

I recently got a new slab mold from Paw Paw's Woodcrafts through Etsy. I opted for a 9 bar. I wanted a smaller one, and Boyd Jackson (the owner of the shop) pointed out that it would be more money to custom make a 6 bar, than to buy the 9 bar and use the galvanized cutter that it comes with to size it down! Genius!  The cutter has quite a wide handle and wasn't sure what it would be like to line the mold with it in. I opted to wedge a piece of cardboard into the cutting slot instead. it worked famously! To figure out how much soap you need is a really easy equation. Measure the inside length, width and what height you want your bar to be. Example: 6.75" wide X 6.5" long X 1.5" high= 65.81 cubic inches. At this point I Google "65.81 cubic inches" and select US Ounces as the conversion I want. That comes to 36.46oz. I round down or up (if I have the height to do so) to a whole number. I prefer even numbers divisible by 8 for purpose of easy measurement using cups.

The cardboard piece I wedged into the mold had a little gap at the bottom of it where it did not sit flush against the bottom. I wondered if this would matter, but went ahead and lined it as usual and it did not! I line my molds with a variation of Bramble Berry's method. Where they only use half pieces on the edges, I do two full pieces lining the mold one way and then the other. I use a Fiskers paper trimmer to make straight edges a snap. While I do not love lining molds, I have a method that works well and is easy enough so I don't dread it.

I cut and prepared a piece of bubble wrap before hand. This is a trick I have seen in numerous places online and I think it's really clever and looks sharp. By pressing a sheet of bubble wrap into the top of the soap after pouring, it makes a honeycomb design! I checked my bubble wrap for popped bubbles (I didn't want a missing row of comb in the soap!) I found every foot or so there was a row of non-bubbles. But less than a foot would do for what I wanted.

The Wildflower honey I used is local (Lyons, CO) and really delicious. Being wildflower honey it's darker than usual. I embraced the honey + fragrance discoloration bound to happen and factored it into my design.

For this recipe I used fresh goat's milk. I find this at the grocery store and usually freeze it all at once when I get home (after my cat Minnow gets a taste). I put the frozen cubes in gallon bags and label them for future use. This way I always have a stash of pre-frozen milk ready to go and it doesn't go bad. This time I used a larger container to mix my lye and goat milk. It made it much easier and no cubes or lye flakes escaped.

Melting but staying cool and not scorched!

True to form... I didn't take design pictures. So here is what I did! I prepared my oils first. Even before lining my mold and measuring out my fragrance. I wanted it to have ample time to come down in temperature. Once everything was set up and ready I combined my pre-measured lye and goat's milk together in a tall pitcher. I mixed this until it was combined and it was at a cool 85°F, same as my oils. I mixed these together and brought everything to a thin trace. I separated off one cup of unscented soap for the middle layer. I realized at this point I hadn't added the honey! I added it to the base soap along with the fragrance and stick blended until it was at a medium trace. I was going to measure off 14oz of soap for the bottom layer but it was getting kind of thick so I just eyeballed it. I tapped the mold on the counter to even the bottom layer of soap. I mixed dispersed titanium dioxide into the 8oz of unscented soap little by little until it was white enough. I stick blended it a little to thicken it and then gently used a spoon to distribute white soap on without breaking through into the first layer. Then I tapped down the mold. The top layer was a teeny bit tricky because the white soap was not as thick as the main batch. So I had to very gently layer thick pudding consistency soap over medium trace soap. I got some wobbliness in the layers, but over all they stayed pretty nice.

I smoothed off the top layer with a silicone spatula, making it as even as I could before I put the bubble wrap over it.

I laid the bubble wrap over the top of the soap, bubble side down and lightly pressed it into the soap until I could see soap in the spaces between the bubbles. Next time I won't leave wings on the side as it caused the soap to curve up on the edges. I put it in the freezer for 1 hour then transferred to the refrigerator for about 23 hours.

Here it is out of the mold 24 hours later! You can see how it goes up quite a bit on the edges. Shockingly my white layer actually ended up in the middle!! Maybe eye-balling just takes lots of practice?

I used a plain ol' vegetable peeler to trim the high edges. I didn't go wild with it since it would ruin the comb pattern on the sides, but it made it much neater!

I took a few pictures of my new cutter because I think it's so nifty!! The reason I chose this mold, aside from the really reasonable price (some wood slab molds are upwards of $60!!) is the built in cutting guides and the big custom cutter that is included in the sale. I used a small cutting board to transfer the slab of soap back to the mold. I didn't really want any gashes on the still smooth bottom of the mold so I left the cutting board in there while I cut. Like buttah I tell you!

Little beauties!