Cocoa Coconut Milk Soap

If you’ve followed this blog you know that we make our own soap. We started with this basic bar and graduated to using goats milk instead of water. We found that we absolutely love goats milk soap since it gives the soap so much lather. Well, we have moved on to our new favorite – coconut milk soaps!

This is one of our new ones we made in our last soaping session back in March. It’s our Cocoa Coconut Milk soap. In addition to using coconut milk, we also processed it at room temperature. More about that later.

It’s a beautiful brown bar.

Here is the lather with just a tiny bit of water and me spinning the soap around in my hand twice.

To use the coconut milk, we pour the liquid into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then when we are ready to make soap, all we have to do is pull out some cubes and weigh them to get the correct amount. The cubes are easy to cut if needed.

Please refer to the cold process instructions here.

However, we decided to experiment with room temperature process on this batch. We put the frozen coconut milk cubes into the lye container. We then added the lye little by little as it melted the coconut milk. While Dave worked with the lye and coconut milk, I melted the oils. Once both solutions were melted we set them aside and made another soap. When we came back to this soap, both containers were around 65 or 70 degrees (remember this is March and our house is cool). We proceeded like we normally do adding the lye-coconut milk solution to the oils. We added the fragrance oil and Avocado oil at trace.

We wanted to experiment with room temperature soap and it worked. If you are just starting to make soap, I’d still recommend you work with the “normal” or more popular process. However, if you’ve got some bars under your belt, try this.

Also, you will notice that I have indicated that the Avocado oil is optional. We’ve been adding oils at trace and from everything we’ve read it doesn’t really add much to the bar. We’ve decided that our future bars will not have any oil added at trace.

If you have made our Coconut Cocoa Soap (which is still one of my favorites), the only difference is that we used coconut milk instead of goats milk.

We found this soap to be so creamy and bubbly, but still a hard bar. We’ll still make some goats milk soaps, but coconut milk sure kicks it up a notch! We’ll be making more once the gardening slows down.