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.


Olive Oil (30%) 270 grams
Palm Oil (30%) 270 grams
Coconut Oil (25%) 225 grams
Castor Oil (5%) 45 grams
Cocoa Butter (10%) 90 grams
coconut milk (frozen into cubes)Â – 342 grams
lye – 125 grams
2 Tablespoons Coconut Fragrance Oil
4 Tablespoons Avocado oil at trace (OPTIONAL)
This makes 2 lbs of soap or 10 bars. As with any recipe you get off of the internet, please run this through one of the calculators. This one is my favorite.
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.
Looks awesome! Would love to try some of this
Donna, Thanks!
I have just come across this soap and want to make it. Does the brown color(which I love) come from the fragrance oil as I would like to leave that out if possible. Thanks so much !
Hi Lizzy,
Yes, a lot of the FOs darken the soap. If you leave it out your soap should be white. Thanks for stopping by. If you make the soap I’d love to hear about it.
Can you recommend a substitute for the palm oil in this recipe?
Amanda recently posted..Getting out…
Amanda, If you are trying to avoid palm, try our Sunny Calendula Soap. Here is the recipe: https://lyndaheines.blog/2013/08/sunny-calendula-soap/ You could change Cocoa Coconut Milk Soap by adding more olive oil, more coconut oil and add shea butter but you’d need to completely rework the recipe and run it through the soap calc. Hope that helps.
Hi,
Thanks for the idea would love to try it. Just wanted to know have you tried making this with the coconut milk in the diary aisle? If so do you get similar results? Also, I don’t have the fragrance oil but was thinking of using cocoa powder to color the soap. How much would you recommend. Thanks.
Deb, We’ve never used coconut milk from the dairy section. I assume it will still give you some wonderful soap but I’d still freeze it first. In one of our past soaps we put 2 teaspoons of cocoa to color it but it was used with a fragrance oil that also made it dark.
Hi, I’m in England and don’t see bottles labled palm oil. Would you be able to suggest any other names for it or could I just use a vegetable oil?
Many thanks
Hi Tracey, You don’t have to use palm oil. There are others you can substitute. Check out this list of my soap recipes and you’ll see some where we don’t use palm. https://lyndaheines.blog/soap-etc/soap-recipes/