Marvelous Mocha Moose Soap

Is there any combination more wonderful than chocolate and coffee? It’s a real treat for the senses.

Chocolate Mousse Fragrance Oil makes a delectable soap.

Today we’re featuring our fabulous Chocolate Mousse Fragrance Oil. It smells like milk chocolate – creamy, chocolatey, and sweet. It’s marvelous in all sorts of body care products, but I wanted to combine it with coffee notes to make a soap I’ll call Mocha Moose. (In Alaska, we enjoy naming things after moose for some oddball reason.)

To really accent the chocolate fragrance, I’ll use Cocoa Butter in the soap. I’ll also use Coffee Butter and some ground coffee beans for a scrubby feel. The coffee and chocolate combination is sure to be a fantastic eye-opener in your morning shower!

MAKE IT

Come along as we gather some ingredients and make soap!

RECIPE

When creating this recipe, I was looking at the different properties each ingredient will add to the finished soap. One thing I try to keep in mind is lather. Most people expect their soap to lather, and I always get complaints from my husband if the lather in the soap is not up to his standards.

Cocoa Butter and Jojoba Oil both help form a stable lather, but it’s a good idea to keep each of these at a lower percentage of your total oils. Jojoba also causes acceleration, so be prepared when using it.

Coffee Butter combines Coffee Oil with Soybean Oil to create a luscious butter that smells as delicious as a freshly brewed cup of joe. Soybean Oil is a great foundation for soap recipes. It behaves very nicely, and it’s inexpensive. Plus, it’s wonderful for skin and makes creamy, conditioning lather.

Palm Kernel Oil helps create a hard bar of soap (which means it will last longer), and it makes large bubbles. Coconut Oil also makes large, fluffy bubbles – and plenty of them!

This recipe also has two other additives: Powdered Sugar and Sodium Lactate. Both additives help keep the batter fluid, which is important if you don’t want to be plopping spoonfuls of soap batter like peanut butter. This recipe has mostly solid oils, which will contribute to a faster trace.

Powdered sugar also boosts the lathering capability of the finished soap. Sodium Lactate hardens the bar, though I used it in this recipe mainly because it will help keep the batter fluid.

Here is the recipe for a 16-ounce batch (which will fill our Soap Stone Mold) and in percentages so you can scale to your preferred soap mold.

INSTRUCTIONS

I’m going to skip the soap making steps, assuming that our readers know how to make soap. If you need more instruction, please see this blog post, which is the beginning of a series on how to make cold process soap.

Let’s make this soap!

Weigh lye and add to pre-measured water. Stir in a well-ventilated area. I like to mix the lye on the front porch and then leave it there for 15 minutes or so to let it cool.

While the lye solution is cooling, weigh all the oils into a soap bucket and microwave in one-minute increments, stirring after each heating, until the oils are liquid. Add powdered sugar and use a stick blender to mix it thoroughly. Set aside to cool.

I let the oils and lye solution sit on my work table for a couple of hours to let them come to room temperature. That’s another trick to slowing down trace. I added the sodium lactate to the lye solution at this point. (And because it was cool in my work room, and there are so many hard oils in this recipe, my oils had become nearly solid, so they had to be melted again.)

The oils are all melted, lye solution is ready, and the ground coffee and fragrance oil are prepped.

In this image, you can see that the soap batter is fairly thick after being mixed just to emulsion.

In go the coffee grounds, which will add some scent and a bit of scrubby texture.

Stirring the coffee grounds into the soap batter by hand.

Once you add the lye solution to the oils, you’ll need to work fast. I hand-stirred for about a minute, and the batter was already thickening before even being emulsified. I gave it just a few quick zips with the stick blender – literally three or four one-second bursts – then I added the fragrance and coffee grounds. Another quick stir to get the fragrance and coffee mixed in well, and into the mold we go!

The batter was still pourable, so I counted this batch a success! I covered the mold with a plastic container and set it in a warm spot so the saponification process would not stall. (That can be a problem when using individual cavity molds and leaving the soap in a cool spot.)

Pouring into the Soap Stone Mold.

After pouring, I placed the soap in a warm spot.

NOTES

I’m a sucker for anything chocolate and anything coffee, so obviously I love this soap.

This recipe would probably have frustrated me greatly had I not planned for it to be a fast-moving batch. My mold was ready, and I worked fast. That’s the key to making this a success.

This is one soap that will bring a smile in the shower. It smells so delicious, and I think the scrubby factor from the coffee grounds will be just about right.

Do you like scrubby soaps? What’s your favorite scrubby additive?