I love drinking cold peppermint tea in the summer. Especially after being in the hot sun. I also love using peppermint handmade soap made with peppermint essential oil.  It’s a very cooling and refreshing scent!

These poppy peppermint guest soaps are ready to use. Actually I made it with the hot process method so it’s perfectly fine to us within a couple of days. But it didn’t turn out so nice early on - the bar was too soft.

But after a few more weeks they have harden up and make great guest or travel soap. Perfect as face soap too. The poppy seeds is good for exfoliation.

After I removed it from the heart shaped mold, it was still rough around the edges. Definitely not as smooth looking as cold process soap. Yet it’s still good soap made with all good stuff.

Ingredients: Oils of coconut, palm, soybean, rice bran, grape seed, and wheat germ. Distilled water, sodium hydroxide, French green clay, Peppermint essential oils, poppy seeds.

For my summer soap shop special, I’ll be adding 2 FREE poppy peppermint guest soap with each order. Something nice to stay extra COOL this summer!

Note: I got bite by the soapmaking bug this month… and have more new soaps on the curing rack. So stay tuned!

These are my new “Seabuckthorn & Green Tea Handmade Soaps”. Since I was having so much fun with hot process soaping, I decided to make these the same way.

You can usually tell if it’s hp soap by the little bubbles around the surface. This is noticeable even when I made sure to fill the mold all the way with soap. Hot process soap is tricky in that sense.

Ingredients: Olive oil, soybean oil, coconut oil, palm oil, distilled water, seabuckthorn oil, rice bran oil, green tea powder, and green tea melon fragrance. Because they are half circle bars, they fit well in the palm of my hands.

The last Seabuckthorn soap I made was was nice and I added lots of good ingredients. Including red palm oil, which gave it the deep golden color.

For this version, I just kept it simple. Except I also added green tea powder. Green tea is making it’s mark in many cosmetic products due to it’s benefits to skincare.

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Last weekend I had a special request to make Honeysuckle Himalayan soap. It’s really become one of my favorite soap too. I always feel more energized after showering with it.

The request was made using the hot process (HP) method. The advantages of HP over cold process (CP) is that it can be used within a few days. And it also makes for a harder bar too.

I have a small Crock Pot that can make only 1 batch at a time. I tried to make a larger batch once and it over flowed and had to deal with raw soap - not fun.

Notice the top portion doesn’t look too pretty. Kind of lumpy. But it’s still the same good soap!

This 1st batch went well but just doesn’t look too pretty. Although it is still very nice soap. Batch #2 started to crumble near the edges while I was cutting it. It looks to me like the soap cooled too fast. The middle part is nice and creamy, but the edges just not too pretty.

HP soaping has it’s challenges and is difficult to put into the mold, as it’s very hard and starts to harden up fast. I think the best mold for HP is a cylinder mold like an old Pringles can. I made Eucalyptus Mint using HP method and it turned out really nice.

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Recently I wanted to make my 2nd batch of hot process soap.  Sadly it also became my 1st failed batch of handmade soap.  It was going to be a nice bar of Chocolate Mint with bits of coffee grounds for exfoliation.  But it was far from it.  I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong since I used all the correct measurements of oils, water, and lye.  But I do have to say one thing I didn’t do was put all my heart and soul into this batch.

I even measured out the oils a day ahead.  Then mixed the lye the following day and then poured it right into the crock pot.  No temperature check.  I walked away (into another room) and just let it cook for several hours.  Thinking back, it would have been better had I kept an eye on it more.

Photo Gallery: 1. Batch looked OK here.  2.  Failed Batch after molding.  3.  Re-batch.  4. Cooked for 1 hour.  5.  Finished chocolate mint laundry & dish washing soap.  6.  I put the gelled soap into an empty fruit juice container.

At first it started to look like it was doing OK.  The slight mountain of foam which later turned into an applesauce effect (pictured above).  So I thought, “Great!  I’ve cooked it for more then 2 hours, so it should be done by now.”  Meaning I can finally add the “chocolate mint” fragrance oil.

According to Mike, the experienced soapmaker, this is where it all went bad.  The fragrance oil may have seized my batch and ruined it.  Afterward, it started to look more like cottage cheese or little bits of rice and just never “gelled”.

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This was my first attempt at hot process soapmaking. The main reason why I didn’t want to make hot process soap was because I didn’t think the end result would look as nice as cold process. But I was SO wrong! It looks just as nice. And it was much more fun and easier than I anticipated.

I read Handcrafted Soap by Delores Boone before attempting this new method of soapmaking. I was surprised that it didn’t curled up along the edges like Delores had mentioned in her book. Instead it looked like cottage cheese and then applesauce. And finally it looked like Vaseline and I knew I was going in the right direction. It was an exciting day of soapmaking for me. I decided to add a bit of Peppermint essential oil at the end, but didn’t have enough. I was tempted to use Vanilla extract, but decided to skip it. Now it has just a hint of peppermint.

Here are the different stages of my 1st attempt at hot process soapmaking.

Advantages of hot process soapmaking: Read the rest of this entry »