New Batch of Vegan Soap

I made a new batch of soap for the first time in over a year (that's how long the last batches lasted and I gave most of them away as presents). Here's my original soap making blog.

I was just going simple and used a small amount of patchouli oil only as I wasn't sure how the difference in climate (change from Sydney, Australia to Utah, USA) would affect the process.

I ended up with an oil film at the top of my soap after the 18-24 hour setting period. This happened to be a few times when making soap in Australia too so obviously not the Utah climate. I just poured off the extra oil and the soap still turned out fine. I had to leave the soap setting about 3 days before it was solid enough for me to pull out and cut, when normally it would only be a day.

I think maybe I need to wait longer than 20mins (with stirring) to make sure it's slightly set prior to putting into molds. Maybe 30mins - 1 hour.

I bought this super nice 4lb wooden soap mold from Bramble Berry. I got 14x 1 1/2 inch thick pieces from it.

All together I got 24 pieces of soap, 8 of those were from a cake tin so are quite a bit larger than the mold ones, however the mold makes them much neater.