Soap Challenge Week 4 - In The Mold

Warning - this is a long, descriptive post so if you just want to look at the pretty pictures...scroll down! Heeeee!

After what seemed like an exhausting amount of planning, I finally made my alcohol soap! I have always wanted to make a vodka soap but the alcohol content seemed just too high. I've never made a beer soap so I had my mind made up that I was going to make a beer soap. However, I was talking to hubby about it one night earlier this week and he said "You know what would be cool? A pirate soap made with rum!" OKAY THEN.

I did some research and talked to several of my soaping friends and decided that the rum really wasn't worth the effort. Then I mentioned it to hubby again and he said, "Awe..I was really hoping you'd make the pirate soap." OKAY THEN.

Off hubby went to the liquor store and he bought some Capt. Morgan's Coconut Rum. He also got me some beer as a back-up. After all, he said I could drink it if I didn't soap it. :-) I figure it's a six-pack, why not do both! :-)

I was talking to a friend and she suggested I soap with coconut water. I decided that was a great idea so hubby got some coconut water at the store as well. Let's get this party started.

I started off by pouring almost the entire bottle of the rum into a heavy pan. It was incredibly precise...some for soap...some for some pina coladas later that evening. (Which totally hasn't happened yet by the way.) I boiled it on a rolling boil for 5 minutes and then let it simmer for 40 minutes. My goal was an hour at a low simmer but it had boiled down so much that I wanted to have some left and turned off the heat. By the time that process was done, I had only 5 oz of coconut rum syrup. I let it cool down to room temperature and then mixed it with 5 oz coconut water. Let me tell you, it smelled delish! I poured it into my little bug molds and put it in the freezer. I checked on it that night and it looked like it was frozen. When I went to unmold the rum/coconut water cubes yesterday, they were frozen but not completely. I think it was the sugar content. They were just like popsicles in consistency and had the syrupy liquid around it as well. I wasn't sure but I decided to use it.



You can watch the video but basically, I was impatient and dumped the lye into the frozen rum/coconut water cubes and the sugars burned. At first it was yellow, then orange, and then bright red!



I didn't mind the burning. It didn't stink and I was wanting a darker color for the base of the soap anyway. I let that caramel colored lye solution cool down and then went ahead using it in the soap. The soap was not accelerating and blending so well that I figured something was wrong. It did come to a medium trace relatively easily but not fast like I thought.



Then I stopped to clean off my blender. In that time, it got pretty thick. Then instead of suh-macking my mold right away, I let it sit while I tried to get every last bit of soap out of my bucket. I shouldn't have done that either! LOL! The consistency was just like caramel, including the air pockets like caramel has that I couldn't get to release.



So after watching Amy's video and then it happening to me as well, the key here is to just stop blending sooner than later. Once you get a light trace, just go ahead and pour it. Either that or don't dilly daddle and get that soap in the mold! This is your number one priority!

I wanted a nice colorful top to emphasize the parrot part of my pirate soap. Hubby said color was fine and swirls were fine, but I was NOT to texture the top. LOL! OKAY THEN!

I had another small batch of soap ready to be blended. I left it unscented and rather thin and colored it blue, yellow, and red.



The pictures don't show the red well because it was raining at the time and dark.





So there you go! I'm going to unmold it later this afternoon and see what my situation is. Here's hoping!