August 14, 2014

Orange and cinnamon soap

Have you ever tried to make soap at home? Here you have a very good recipe from Alba and Jabones de Guara, a fantastic blog with different recipes of natural soaps, don't miss it!

This soap is made of orange of course! and cinnamon. It is a soap for the shower, nice and balanced, and its preparation is very simple. For this recipe we need, among other things, orange essential oil. You can buy it or make it according to our recipe that we published in a previous article.

Before starting, we must take into account the safety measures, because we are going to handle a strong alkali, which can cause serious burns if not handled properly.

Recipe for approximately 1.5 kg of soap (a little more):

Extra virgin olive oil: 715 g
Coconut oil or coconut butter*: 180 g
Shea butter*: 110 g
Cocoa butter* : 70 g
Water: 300 g
Soda at 99% purity: 139.7 g (9% of overfatting)
Essential oils: 50 g (30 g of sweet orange*) sweet orange10 g of mandarin and 10 g of Chinese cinnamon)
Shavings and balls of another similar soap colored with cinnamon* powder. Weigh them and add this weight to the 1.5 kg of soap; in my case I added 250 g of shavings and balls...
Natural vitamin E, from sunflower: 7-10 g (to prevent the soap oils from going rancid).

The preparation is very simple:

We will prepare the lye with the water and the soda (always pour the soda on top of the water and never the other way around) and let it warm up.
In the meantime we will temper the oils and butters until they melt, adding the vitamin E.
Mix the lye in the oils and whisk gently until a light trace is reached.
Add the essential oils and mix well.
We will divide in two parts the soap mass, to add in one the shavings.
We will pour first the part with the shavings in our mold and then the rest of the dough, placing the soap balls wherever we want.
Cover the mold and it will be ready to be cut the next day.
We will wait at least 4 weeks to complete the saponification and then we will be able to use it.