Calendula Olive Oil Soap

Well, I’ve been wanting to make this soap for quite a while. My friend Marsha is allergic to all nut oils so I’ve been itching to make some olive oil soap for her. In fact, my whole reason for infusing calendula flowers in the olive oil was for her soap. Anyway, last week I finally got up the nerve to make this soap and used my new silicone mold.

Calendula soap in mold

After all of my research, I failed to realize that I needed to not only leave this soap in the mold longer than 24 hours, but also I need to grease these molds. This is due to the high percentage of olive oil. As you see below, one soap came out perfect, the others I ended up piling the soap on top of the part of the soap that behaved!

Calendula Soap

But I know they will be fine. They just look a tad funky. Now they need to cure from 6 to 12 weeks, much longer than my normal 4 weeks. Some of the Calendula flowers left over from infusing were ground up and added to trace.

Here is my recipe. If you are not familiar with cold process soap making, check out this link for instructions.

This recipe is smaller than my other batches because I was using this new silicone mold. It turned out that this batch was still too large for that mold. I ended up pouring the remaining soap into a milk carton. I’ve given you percentages so you can make this to the size of batch you want to make. I also make my soap in grams because I feel it’s more accurate although a lot of soapers have success with ounces. Just do what makes you feel comfortable but be sure run any recipe through a soap calculator.

I’m looking forward to giving this to Marsha once it has cured. And now that I know that I need to grease the mold, I’ll try this again. But we’ve talked about our next soap adventure will either involve lard or cocoa and mango butters with mango fragrance oil. Fun!