hot soap

I stumbled into hot soap making by default really - I made a batch of soap which didn't work properly so I tipped it into a pan and heated it up until it cooked. I have now decided that hot soap making is actually easier for me to do than cold! Some questions though, for people who know about these things...

Does soap have to be completely "cooked" before you can mould it? I have a batch which still has a little bite to it, but has now solidified. I made it about 4 days ago. Will it sort itself out just by dint of being in the cupboard wrapped in greaseproof paper for a while?

I also made 2 batches of lavender soap using a mix of rapeseed and olive oil. I used a soap calculator and am very sure I got the right amount of lye and oil. The only other addatives were a cup of dried lavender flowers and 10 ml lavender oil per batch. One batch worked really well, but the other is leaking brownish oil slightly. Any ideas as to what went wrong and anything I can do to fix it?

Thanks!

sally_in_wales

Fun isn't it! Its best to cook the soap out if you are hot processing (sort of one method or the other), but give it time to cure and it should finish for the batch that wasn't quite there. With the lavender one, did you put the lavender oil and flowers in right at the end- once its gone to that sort of 'vaseline' stage? It shouldnt split out, but again, might just need a bit of curing time.

One last thing, hot processed soap is often a wee bit softer in texture than cold processed, which seems odd when you think how hard it gets right when you want to gloop it into a mould, so airing for a few extra days is always a good thing. Otherwise, it sounds as if you did everything right.

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