This is my first time making soap dough! Soap dough is soap batter that has gone through saponification but is still pliable. The texture is like clay almost, and you can create some beautiful embeds for inside or on top of your soaps.
I was always intimidated by it, thinking that I needed a specific recipe, so I didn’t read into it too much. Turns out you can use any soap recipe! The key to creating soap dough is don’t expose it to air. When you cure soap, what you’re doing is evaporating excess water to make a harder bar. So if the soap isn’t exposed, the water doesn’t evaporate, which leaves the soap pliable.
I’m choosing to do the heat transfer method, it's quick and I’m okay with this soap batch accelerating. I’m using coconut and palm oils, which have a low melting point. If you’re using harder butters like cocoa butter or large amounts of solid butters you should melt them in the crock pot. In a situation where you want a more fluid batter then I recommend melting your oils in a crock pot and cooling your lye, which we will do in another post, but for soap dough, using the heat transfer method is quicker and easier.
I need to make a batch of white soap dough for a soap vision I have, so I will be colouring with titanium dioxide. I’m doing a 16oz batch, and if I don’t use it all it will be fine for a while and I can use it for future projects. I’m not adding any fragrance for the embeds, they’re more versatile this way.
First thing I’ve done is weigh out my solid oils into a bowl, and my liquid oils into a seperate container. Then measure out your lye and water, (I’m using 30% water) and add them together. Remember always add the lye to the water so there’s less risk of splashing. Stir with a plastic fork until all the lye is dissolved and the mixture turns clear. Use caution because it’s very hot!! Pour the hot lye solution into the bowl with your solid oils. Using a silicone spatula, gently stir and break up the larger chunks.
While that melts, add your colours to your liquid oils and blend. Especially with titanium dioxide, you want to blend it in and blend it some more. Cutting open your beautiful soap and seeing titanium dioxide streaks sucks! So make sure that titanium dioxide is mixed in very well.
The solid oils don’t take very long to melt, keep stirring slowly until they are, then add those liquid oils. Go in with the stick blender. I think you want it thick, so I blended until it was a medium trace.
I had a small freezer bag set up in a container to pour the batter into, because the key to soap dough is no air. I poured into the bag and sealed it up, squeezing as much air out of the bag as I could. Then tossed it onto my curing rack to saponify.
You must wait 24 hours at least to ensure the soap has fully saponified. The bag felt hard after a day, like really hard and I was a bit worried, but once I broke some of the soap off and worked it in my hands, it was very pliable and like a soft play dough texture. I didn’t wear gloves while working the dough, and I rolled it up into a bunch of little balls to use as polka dot embeds!
I hope you try this, I would say this method is more intermediate because you want enough soap batches under your belt that you have a recipe you’re comfortable working with. I’m so pleased with how it turned out, my next plan is to make a 2lb batch of soap dough and split it into 4 colours.
To see the polka dot inspired soap I made with these embeds make sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok!
Lindsay
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