Making soft set is not difficult, many just seed a runny honey with a soft set one and let it set. This tends to give larger crystal sizes (darker coloured honey) and is fine but has a grainy texture, although many proponents of the "easy" soft set method claim its as smooth as butter.....it isn't.
The original method was developed by Dyce in the USA and was method for making soft set from clover honey to prevent if fermenting and included a pasteurization step not used in the making of soft set today It was also known as creamed honey before EU stopped us describing it as thuis because it did not contain real cream!
To make it you first need your "seed" honey. This can be a a shop bought soft set, or take a set honey and grind it into a white paste of very small crystals with a pestle and mortar/ spice grinder etc.
You add this to your liquid honey (I part seed to approx 10 parts liquid honey) and the small crystals act as seeds and all the crystal's that form will be of this small size. This is where it gets a little complicated as these crystals will tend to aggregate together to create larger crystals and these need to be broken down as they are forming to create a much smoother soft set honey.
Originally I tried using various drill attachment's, but they are crap as they tend to draw air into the mixture leaving a froth on the top of jars after bottling.
The best manual instrument I found was the Thornes Honey creamer which looks like a huge potato masher. You needed to work your soft set this with as often as you could, 3 or 4 time s a day to break all these crystal aggregates down to smaller sizes. Hard work.
Then I splashed out and bought myself a mechanical soft set machine. This is a tank with a large paddle like a butter churn. This slowly works the seeded honey for 15 minutes then rests it for and hour before repeating. Takes 2-3 days to make a large batch. This constant mechanical rubbing of the crystals together by the paddle breaks them down to the smallest size possible giving an amazingly white soft set.
You need it to be cool to make soft set , 14C is the often given best temperature....yeah we all have temperature controlled rooms Doh....
Wow just checked price of creamer I bought from Abelo..it's doubled in price