My name is Amanda Griffin and I am a soap maker living in Grand Prairie, TX.  My passion is sharing, talking and teaching the craft of soap making in the classroom, on my blog (www.lovinsoap.com) and in my eZine, Lovin’ Soap.

One of the best things about soap making is being a part of the soaping community.  Whether it’s on a forum, at a meet-up, at a conference or at a local supply shop; soap makers are some of the most passionate, creative and caring people I have ever met.  I’m truly grateful to be a part of this amazing community of crafters.

I’ve been on a chai kick lately.  I managed to wean myself off of Starbucks Peppermint Mochas only to discover the greatness of their Chai Lattes.  Those things are addicting.  So look-y what I ordered to soap!

I ordered Bramble Berry’s Chai Tea Cybilla.  It smells wonderful!  I was going to blend it with some coffee but I looked through my FO stash and couldn’t find any.  O’well.

I found these little 3 fl. oz. white cups at the grocery store awhile ago and knew that I wanted them for my Chai soap.

This was going to be a test batch so I came up with a small recipe.  When you’re doing a recipe this size be sure to measure in grams and be as exact as you can.

Palm oil – 90 g

Coconut oil – 90 g

Olive oil – 90 g

Cocoa butter – 30 g

Castor oil – 30 g

Lye – 46 g

Water – 100 g

*A note on this recipe + BB’s Chai Tea.  I knew the fragrance oil would probably accelerate a bit because it does contain spice.  I didn’t even use a stick blender; I just mixed with a spoon and it thickened quickly and also got very hot.  Also note that my recipe is a pretty quick tracing recipe because of the palm and the cocoa butter.  So if you want to slow things down when using fragrance oils like this…use a recipe that contains higher amounts of olive.  If you’re okay with lard, lard is slower to trace than palm so works great also.  Keep your temps down as soaping cooler tends to slow trace.  Adding the fragrance oil to your melted oils helps also if you have a fast moving FO.*

For this soap, I’m going to make this recipe twice.  Once for the bottoms and again for the tops.  So make your soap as usual and bring to trace.  Pour it into the individual cups.

That was easy enough!  Now we’re going to make the tops.  Since these are hot drinks I wanted a layer of cream on top that molded to the top instead of a whipped top like they put on the cold drinks.  I’m going to make our same recipe and do sort of a partial whipped.  I used a cold lye solution but melted the oils like I usually do and let them cool a bit.  Since I used cocoa butter I couldn’t let them cool too much or it would start to re-solidify.  I wanted the topping to be more white so I added some Titanium Dioxide dissolved in water.

Once you have your lye solution cold (put it covered and labeled in the fridge) pour your lye into the melted oils.  I wanted to whip some air into this mixture so I used a beater instead of my stick blender.  I didn’t add any fragrance oil because I wanted it to stay nice and white.

You can see after I’ve whipped it for a bit it gets more white in color.

I beat it for about 10 minutes.  Longer than I thought it would take!  You want to look for it to become whiter and a bit frothy/slightly whipped.  My goal is to pour it over the tops of the drink bottoms and have it spread on its own.  So you don’t want something that you have to spread with a knife.  We’re ready to pour the tops on.

I scraped off the tops of the cups to make them more even.  I would actually recommend leaving a bit more head room in your drinks than I did so you have room for the cream topping (so spoon out a bit).  I’ll add more cream topping for the next batch – lesson learned.

Gently spoon the topping on.  If you do it slow enough and a bit at a time it will form a nice dome without running over the sides.

Depending on what drink you’re making, you can sprinkle of some topping.  I added a bit of cinnamon to these.  If I were doing a peppermint mocha I would shave a bit of brown soap to look like chocolate shavings on top.

These cups are super easy to unmold.  Let them sit like this for about 24 hours, pop in the freezer for 10 minutes or so and gently push from the bottom while squeezing the sides gently.  They pop right out.

On Bramble Berry’s website they do state that this fragrance oil discolors to brown.  This is exactly what I want so I didn’t add any colorant.  If I wanted a darker brown I could have added some brown mica or even some cocoa powder.

Here are the chai soaps labeled. You could leave them naked, put a label around the naked soap or my favorite (see below)…put them back in cups and put the label on the cups.  They ended up being about 3.5 ounces (so if you download my label template, make sure to check the size of your batch).

Download the label template here.