My mom found a recipe for chocolate soap, so I thought I’d give it a try with a few friends, because, be honest with me ladies, who wouldn’t want to bathe in chocolate??? So here it is–chocolate soap:
40 oz olive oil
24 ox coconut oil
1 oz unsweetened baking chocolate
4 TB cocoa powder
8 oz lye
4 cups water
The process is the same for all soaps, this one just happens to be chocolate, so you could also use the plain ol’ soap recipe here if you don’t like chocolate or want to try a regular soap:
16 oz coconut oil
16 oz olive oil
32 oz lard
24 oz water
9 oz lye
Both of these recipes will fill a 9×13 pan–that’s a lot of soap. You can cut them down as desired.
Step 1: measure your water in a glass bowl:
Step 2: Put on your protective gear and measure your lye separately. Lye is horribly caustic–get your rubber gloves, apron, and eye protection on! I’m using my postal scale to measure the ounces, and I got my lye online from The Lye Guy.
Step 3: Open a window or take the whole operation outside, and add the lye to the water while stirring. Seriously bad cough hack ick fumes here. Maybe a mask of some sort would be helpful. When you add the lye to the water, the mixture gets really hot. Don’t be holding it on your lap!
Heat your oils until they all melt. What you are trying to do is get the lye water to cool down to 110 degrees at the same time the oils hit 110 degrees. Not an easy task!
See? I got it too hot, so I had to put cold water and ice in my bottom pan to cool my oils down quick.
Step 5: When the oils and the lye water are both 110 degrees give or take a degree, add the lye water to the oils while stirring with your stir stick (used to mix milkshakes) or spoon if you’re real ambitious. DON’T turn the stir stick on yet!
Step 6: When the oils and lye water are combined, do a little pulsing with the button on the stir stick, gradually increasing to holding the button down all the time while stirring the stuff in the pot.
Step 6: Mix until your soap reaches “trace”. This is when it’s kind of thick like pudding, and it leaves a “scar” when it’s dripped across the top of itself. Like this:
Trace is when you add any extras like essential oils for fragrance, oatmeal, flower petals, etc. We just added the cocoa powder. You could add some orange essential oil here and have Pim’s soap, or peppermint EO and have peppermint patty soap. Might try one of those next time :) Mix it all in.
Step 8: Pour the soap into the molds, then wrap in a towel to keep it warm and let it sit for 24-48 hours.
The regular soap was hard enough to come out in 24 hours, but this chocolate one was still pretty soft since it had a higher proportion of liquid oil to start with, so I let it sit about 48 hours before taking it out. Strange thing, as this soap hardened it turned from a milk chocolate color to a dark chocolate color. Still looks yummy :)
Step 9: Cut the soap into useable size pieces, then put it somewhere where you won’t be bugging it every day and let it cure for 4-6 weeks. The regular soap we made was ready in 4 weeks, this one might take longer since it’s so soft still. Don’t leave it sitting on your table or anywhere that’s high traffic in your house, or your son might come take a taste (just a little lick, mom) and realize it’s not really chocolate after all. :-)
Delicious!Keep preparing! Angela
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That really does look yummy! Does anyone have a chunk I can try out in the shower? ;) So sad I missed it, I doubt I’ll ever be willing to do that much work. ;)
It looks good enough that kids may want to use bad language in the hope of getting their mouth washed out with it.
Very interesting recipe, indeed. I haven’t heard of chocolate soap before, but it sounds almost good enough to eat!
Thanks for sharing this…
You rock! I have never in my entire life felt any desire to make soup…until today! Thanks!
I’d never be able to make that one because I’d want to “eat” the chocolate. For me anything Chocolate should be edible. Anything else can be soap. Pretty neat though.
very delicious.. Yummy…