How to make sugar syrup and use it for soap making

In this video I share an easy sugar syrup recipe that can be made in a few minutes, stored in the fridge and added to your cold process or hot process soap recipes.

Sugar is a wonderful ingredient in soap making. It helps to boost the lather of all kinds of recipes and is especially useful in castile soap making and other soap recipes with high amounts of olive oil or other unsaturated oils that tend to have less lather.

In the video, I made a simple sugar syrup with:

• 2 cups white cane sugar (420g)

• 1 cup water (250g)

Method:

1. Add sugar and water to a saucepan and melt together, stirring continually, on low-medium heat until sugar granules are completely dissolved.

2. Once cooled slightly, pour into a clean glass jar or bottle and refrigerate for long term storage.

3. Add sugar syrup to your soap recipes at any stage (mix into oils or to soap batter after lye solution is added) at a rate of 1-3% of the total base oils for the soap recipe.

   * I prefer to use sugar syrup rather than granulated sugar, which needs to be dissolved into the water for the lye solution, before the sodium hydroxide is added.

Some important notes:

1. Not all soap recipes are well suited to added sugars.

2. If your soap is already high lathering (eg. high in coconut oil), there may be little added benefit to adding sugar to the recipe.

3. If you have other high-sugar ingredients in your soap recipe, be careful about adding further sugars to it (especially if you are using honey, alcohols, sweet fruit or vegetable purees, milks/creams etc.).

4. Sugars accelerate trace and saponification in soap recipes. If used excessively, this can cause the soap batter to overheat causing cracking or even volcanoing of the soap batter in the mould. This can be worked around by making your soap using the hot process method (where saponification is forced through cooking) or using individual cavity moulds, which keep the soap batter cooler, preventing overheating.

5. Small amounts of added sugar in simple soap recipes (1-3% sugar syrup of total oil amount for recipe) should not cause you any problems).

Other links:

• Support Elly’s Everyday

• Soap making terms

• Choosing oils for soap making

• Recommended soap calculators

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