When it was done, I added the fragrance, super fatting oil and some goat’s milk. The result was very nearly pudding. Two days later and the soap still had way too much water. I decided to try putting the molds into the oven at a very low temperature for about half an hour and then turned the oven off to help speed the evaporation process. I did several cycles of this over two days and still had soupy soap.
Finally I scraped it all back into the crock pot and cooked it on the lowest setting for probably a couple of hours. I know that heat can cause the milk to darken, but I figured that it’s coffee soap, so that would only enhance the color, and that I was at the point of either doing that or throwing it out anyway.
When it was done, I poured it into a flatter mold to give the soap a ton of surface area for evaporation. Twenty-four hours later, it had formed a thickish skin, but nothing more. I decided to wait another day to see what happened. I just checked it, and it has firmed considerably, so much so that I may be able to cut the soap tonight.
I’ll still have to give the soap a thorough test to be sure that it survived whole process, but it looks as though I will end up with firm, fragrant bars of soap.