Soaps with e.g. cocoa powder or charcoal turn out grainy

[tlm884]

I really like the way this looks. It does look like soapstone as others have mentioned.

I have used cocao before as a colorant/additive and didn't dissolve it in oil or anything before hand. I just threw a couple tablespoons in and stick blended the crap out of it!

 

[khermsen]

I recently tried bittersweet dark chocolate and cocoa to color a batch of CP and MP. I did a layered soap dark chocolate on top, peppermint (mint green) in the middle, the third layer was bittersweet dark chocolate on the CP, cocoa on the MP. Looked like Andes dinner mints. So far I like both soaps but visually prefer the M&P soap which has a very shiny surface like the Andes candy. FOs Peppermint and dark chocolate. The soap scent is to die for................

Will post pics if I figure out how to post them.

 

[Anich]

Ha, I'm glad that my fugly little piece of soapstone has so many fans after all It should definitely be called "Heart of Stone" ("Kivisydän" in Finnish, I think it sounds kinda cool ), I totally agree. I think the reason why I don't like it so much is that I tried to create something very different from this and the result was sort of a disappointment. However, I'm pretty sure I'll take advantage of this knowledge I've acquired by making this batch and use this kind of technique later also. And as mentioned before, this soap is very nice by all other aspects but the looks, so it was definitely worth doing

I completely forgot to mention that I do not use stick blender but mix all by hand and this obviously impacted the poor blending of the cocoa powder. My batches are so small it's not a big bother to mix them by hand and I actually like doing everything by hand. On top of that, it would be really hard to use stick blender to such a tiny amount of soap and I don't have a bowl tiny enough to fill the need. Of course this is a pain when I come across an oil mix that traces sloooowly, but I've quickly learned to avoid oils that delay tracing

khermsen, your soap sounds absolutely fantastic! I'd love to see pics of it

 

[Padamae]

Khermswn, yes i bet that is an wonderful soap.

Anich, I am so sorry I haven't been where I have Internet anywhere but on my phone for the last few weeks. I will try to download my pics tonight and post. I have quite a few on my facebook page though.

 

[Anich]

I'll pick this topic up as I failed again in a quite similar way, the main difference is that this time the colorant was charcoal The FO behaved horribly too this time, but it cannot be the only problem here.

I did everything just the way you all suggested, mixed the fine charcoal with oil before adding and tried to make sure it's not clumpy, and it actually seemed fine, black and even first. However, when I added the FO it traced IMMEDIATELY, in seconds, and at the same time it went all grainy and even worse than that, the color turned much lighter. The FO obviously caused the fast tracing but the graininess had to be due to the charcoal. There wasn't much to do at that point so now all I have is a piece of mouldy-looking unevenly colored and badly textured "soap" which will quite surely turn out to be horrid

Is the stick blender really the only way to make the mix smoother? I really would not like to make bigger batches to be able to use it and on top of that, I really do not want to buy a new stick blender



EDIT: Okay, now I'll definitely blame the FO even more. I found out this curious thing that happened had a name of its own, ricing. I had never ran across this phenomenon but now I absolutely know what it means and I'm SO going to stay away from that particular FO from now on So maybe it wasn't so much about the charcoal after all, though I still think it was too grainy. No matter what the soap looks hideous AGAIN, this time it's terrible for real and makes even the "Heart of Stones" look very pretty