Peppermint Stripe Soap

Finished Bars

I have been trying to get soaps made for the fall and Christmas seasons.  I finally got the last of my colorants in that were ordered.  I started by making a 5 lb batch of soap from olive, coconut, palm kernel and sunflower oils.

Samples in the mold

After measuring out the water and lye and mixing them.  I measured out my oils.  After getting everything measured out, I added the lye mixture directly to the oils and started blending.  Mixing the lye with the oils without melting the oils is my new favorite way to soap.  I find that I have better control over the thickening.  I also added the peppermint oil at this point.  It thickened really quickly.

The second layer going on

I topped the soap with piped stars

I started out using squeeze bottles to fill the molds, starting with the sample mold.  This helped me get things started before the mixture thickened up too much.   I was able to fill the entire sample mold with the squeeze bottles.  I also started out filling the regular mold with the squeeze bottles.  After the soap thickened up I used a rubber spatula to gently spoon the soap into the mold and spread it out.  This was a little tricky because the soap didn't want to be spread.  I did manage, but it took some careful maneuvering.

Love the suds

After I got most of the soap into the mold, I put the last of the soap into the mold by making stars all over the top of the soap in the mold.  This adds to the appearance of the soap.  I let the soap sit for about 5 hours in the mold without any insulation.  When I went to pull the soap out of the mold it had already hardened enough to pull it out.  After I pulled the soap out of the mold, I then pulled it out of the liner to let it dry a little more before slicing.  I sliced it the next afternoon.  I only had one problem with slicing and that was the fact that for some reason the stars on top were a little on the crumbly side.  It wasn't a big issue, but it did make it harder to keep the e red striped looking clean.  After I sliced everything, I let them sit for about another 24 hours.  This kept them from being so soft that the soap sticks to the stamp.  After stamping all of the bars, I lined them back up on the rack so that they can finish curing.

All finished and stamped

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