My first attempt - Manly soap

Every year, for Christmas, my family tries to do some homemade gifts, especially for the grandparents who love those handprint crafts their wee bitty granddaughters have made (or at least participated in long enough for me to get their handprint, lol)!

I decided to take a stab at soapmaking. Aside from being an awesome gift, I needed a new hobby!  As a chemist, using lye was a no-brainer to ensure I got to wear my safety glasses, plus I knew exactly what was going into my soap, and it offered me the greatest wiggle room to play with the recipe.

Wanting something the hubby wouldn't mind using, I googled manly homemade soap and eventually found a recipe for a naturally scented coffee and walnut soap. Sweet! That didn't sound girly at all, and considering the grandparents affinity for coffee, it looked like gold. The notes gave me the impression I would be making a pound or so - no problem!

At 8 o'clock that night (aka, after the kids' bedtime) I gathered my ingredients and got to work, mixing the lye and water (outside, because that stuff will really stink up a house) and then weighing out the oils. But then I realized my mistake. The recipe called for 51 oz. of olive oil! 51oz!? I had clearly not read the details too carefully, seeing how I had roughly 15 oz.

But all was not lost! So what if I had misread the recipe! I was a chemist armed with a calculator and SAP values. Unfortunately, I was short on oils. I ultimately increased my coconut oil and then added some soybean oil until I had enough oils for the lye/water solution that was chilling out in my garage.

Both pots were heated and cooled until they reached just the right temperature to mix. Not willing to invest in a hand blender for a new hobby, I used my husband's power drill with a paint stirrer attachment. It worked beautifully. The mixture reached trace and I stirred in my "gentle exfoliants" of ground coffee and walnuts.

Some 6 hours after I started (read, 2am) I had 5(!) separate molds of soap poured and hanging out on my shower floor because they would not fit anywhere else and be left untouched by toddler hands. I hand cut them and let them cure for 4 weeks.

The outcome:
The recipe (as you have probably guessed) made more than a pound. Actually, it made more than 6.5 pounds! Being a newbie, I really wasn't sure what to expect, but this produced a pretty solid bar with lots of soap suds! I think a great lather is essential to a great bar of soap. Despite all the coffee in it, this soap has a pretty mild scent, but still leaves the skin smelling fresh, and the natural deoderizing properties of the coffee can take the onion smell right off my hands. The exfoliating coffee and walnut definitely do their job, but they were not as gentle as I expected! I have come to think of this bar as more of a scrub soap. It reminds me of a good sugar scrub, less all the oil. Overall, I really like this soap and I find excuses to go shower, just so I can use it - and being a mom, the excuses are pretty easy to come up with.