I've found through experience that there can be different levels of hardness/softness when it comes to paste, and that it's not always easy to judge hardness/softness from pictures. For example, in one of the pics I posted on the forum of my paste in a spoon (in the bottom of
this post here ), it looks like the paste is very soft, but it actually was quite firm/sticky and took a fair bit of muscle to scoop it out of my pot! LOL
For what its worth, though, you can be absolutely confident that you have reached the paste stage successfully as soon as your batter is no longer in a liquid state/is impossible to stir, or is firm/solid enough to hold its own shape.
From your description above, once your batter had 'suddenly' become too hard, I would not even have attempted to stir it. In my opinion, that's a sure sign that you had successfully reached the paste stage at that point.
Yay!
For what it's worth, the more olive oil in a liquid soap formula, the more water it will need during dilution to dissolve the paste. I use only 65% OO in mine and can get away with using less water than you needed for yours, which included more OO.
Looks great!
IrishLass