Whipped Soap

Our forum's challenge this month is whipped soap, which I have heard of but never investigated nor tried.

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=58858

Testing is underway and it is remarkably fun. I've been using a very high tallow recipe which gives the most luscious decadent-looking whipped oils ever. I swear my blood sugar jumps up by 100 points just looking at it because it looks like marshmallow fluff on crack. Lordy. The texture of the batter after lye water is added remains fluffy and firm and is somewhat reminiscent of the batter we got when a slew of us tried the -40% superfat castile recipe. It was fun to work with but I don't much like the resulting soap so haven't made more, but I was disappointed not to have that type of batter to mess around with. Well, now I do! And you can use accelerating FO's largely problem free so I've been having a field day.

My first batch has some issues because my coconut oil didn't whip but rather was broken into small and one or two larger chunks. I think the soap will because zap-free but all the surface chunks of CO melted when I was rinsing the bars under hot water to clean them up a bit. Now they look like moon rocks with pock-marks and mini-craters. Oh! That just gave me the idea of how to make lava rocks!!!

My first set of trials has been working with micas to see what sort of effects I can get and what sorts of wonders it holds for me. I like mica lines a lot but I like them super sharp and fine, which is difficult to get when doing pencil lines. I'm trying different ways to get them to see what gives the best effect and how to control what I get. I like them so far but an still working out how to control the shapes a bit more. I tried mixing them in a bit more in the last ones, to get a raspberry ice cream effect but it's not quite right. I have to figure out the ribbon effect which may not be possible with only this texture of batter. It's very light cake icing-like and if the soap has loads of air whipped in, the resulting soap has this almost styrofoamy texture when cutting it. It most definitely floats. More experiments are called for.

My gray and white soap picture is a touch blurry, but you get the idea.