September 9, 2000

I just unmolded a seriously gross batch of soap. Oh, I am so bummed about this. I had been wanting to make a nice plain oatmeal, milk, and honey batch with GMS and cocoa butter, no scent. I had the picture of the soap in my head for two weeks before I made it, which was last weekend. I just now got a chance to unmold it... after two years I finally discovered what those "tunnels" people reported with honey soaps are. Gross. Apparently the honey heats the soap up (which I saw, because the soap completely gelled, which was disappointing since it was a milk soap except I don't really mind tan soap, but anyways), and it formed a little "cavern" in the end of each log. Actually, there were two caverns in my logs. One end had a big cavern with like a half or three-quarters a cup of milky liquid in it, and the other end had a small cavern with like a tablespoon of what appeared to be that blasted honey, all congealed together. Now, this would be interesting for a science experiment, but dangit, I wanted OMH soap!!!! Phooey. I'm going back to using powdered honey next time. This sucks.

I also made, two weeks ago, some CSDBHP. This batch I wanted to try out something I heard about on the HotSoap list, which was basically to turn off the heat once the water was boiling and just wrap it up to keep the heat in and let it finish cooking that way, hopefully to result in lower temps. Well, it didn't work for me. The soap separated (yuck) and then I said the heck with it and turned the fire back on, and cooked it like normal. Only problem is that I didn't get enough water out. When we went to unmold it, it was *squishy*. Two weeks later, you can still dent the bars with just a moderate pinch. Sigh.