Sea Salt Soap

I'll be finishing up with the last two Christmas posts this week and next on Wednesdays, so hopefully by the time that's over, I'll have something new ready to post about!

This week, we'll take a look at the soap that I made my mother-in-law, who can never ever get enough of the beach.  Having made my father-in-law some wonderful Adirondack soap, I decided to make her some sea-salt soap-scub bars.

After doing some research, I ad-libbed the recipe, and came out with some beautiful bars that I really love (and I hope she does, too!).

Ingredients:

• 6 oz water
• 2.75 oz lye
• 12.75 oz coconut oil
• 1.875 oz castor oil
• 1.875 oz cocoa butter
• 1.875 oz olive oil
• 1 lb Celtic Sea-Salt
• a pinch of yellow coloring
• 15 drops each of Rosemary and Citrus Fresh Essential Oil

I measured and melted the oils as usual, added my yellow coloring, created my lye base, and brought the mixture to trace in about 3 minutes, at which point it turned a nice sunflower color.  After a two hour cook, I added the Essential Oils and Sea Salt and stirred vigorously, before pouring the whole mixture into the mold.

As predicted, the sea-salt made the bar crumbly and difficult to cut.  After letting it sit for about 40 minutes, I took the whole bar out of the mold and cut off the two (now solidified) ends, revealing a slightly mushy center.  Since the edges were hardening fast and the center was still liquidy, I let it sit for a few more minutes, and then I cut another slice off each end.  I repeated this process all the way through, always waiting until the center was just barely hard enough to not droop out when sliced before going ahead, since the edges were continuing to harden and crumble.

Over all, I'm pretty pleased with the results.  I might have to make myself a batch!