Peppermint and Tea Tree Soap

Having a bit of a soap binge of late.  Plan is that they'll be used for gifts as we head towards the end of the year, well if they last that long.

These days I pretty confident with plain cold processed soap - ie, a lye, olive oil/coconut oil type soap.  So have started messing about with more complex soap recipes.

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Peppermint and Tea tree wake-up soap

Soap in the moulds

Soap out of the mould - should actually still be in it, but I had an impatient

16 oz water,
6.1oz lye,
18oz coconut oil,
6oz palm oil (I used macadamia nut oil)
16oz olive oil
2 tbs crushed dried peppermint leaves
1 tbs poppy seeds
0.5oz peppermint essential oil
0.5oz tea tree essential oil

Make soap base, then add peppermint leaves, poppy seeds and essential oils at trace.

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This soap was expensive to make and took two hours to trace.  Luckily hubs was helping stir.

The main expense was the essential oils, and the cost of coconut oil seems to be increasing every single time I buy it.  Rhonda over a Down To Earth mentioned this the other day, and she's been experimenting with copha instead of coconut oil.  Am planning on giving her recipe a try in the near future.

Making Soap

We're nearly out of soap, so I've been having a soap binge in the kitchen.

First batch: Beeswax Soap

14oz water
5oz lye
6oz beeswax
4oz coconut oil
10oz rice bran oil
20oz olive oil

Worked very nicely.







Second Batch: A mishmash batch
This batch has not worked so well.  I'm not completely surprised as I was using up a lot of oils that I had hanging around.  I did use a soap calculator to make sure my lye proportions were right, so I'm confident that was not the problem, but as you can see from the few areas of oil on the top and the slightly white crust on the bottom, the soap has not saponified properly.

Still, all is not lost!
I shall grate this up, melt it down, add some goats milk, avocado oil and some dill essential oil (or similar, not sure what I've got in my collection), and make a really lovely moisturising soap.

:)

This is an On My Mind post, from Rhonda's blog over at Down To Earth.