News & Soap Making

Oatmeal Milk & Honey Soap Cupcakes Piping Soap Challenge September 12, 2016 09:56 5 Comments

September's Great Cakes Soap Challenge is soap piping. Currently, there are less than ten days left before this challenge closes and I have barely an idea of what I am going to do. The guidelines for this challenge are as follows. The soap must be made with cold process soap only. It must have at least one component of your piped soap that has more than one color in one bag. The only embellishment your soap can have is body safe glitter. You can use any type of mold you wish. The challenge is divided into two groups, newbies (making soap for less than two years) and experienced (more than two years). That puts me in the experienced category, but unfortunately, I have only piped soap one time before, more than a few years ago and that didn't look real great in my opinion.

After watching the tutorials, I headed over to the neighborhood Michaels to see what I could find. I came out with silicone cupcake liners and a Cake Boss piping set that was on clearance. I don't even have a clue what 99% of these piping tips do. Over the next few days, I watched many YouTube videos on piping and really starting to feel overwhelmed. Definitely out of my comfort zone.

Since I am using the silicone cupcake liners I first had to figure out volume and times that by how many liners I have. I have eight of these liners which hold approximately 4.4 oz, so I would need to size my recipe to around 35 ounces just to fill them, not including the piping part. I am thinking I will need about two ounces minimum for piping on each, times eight will make the total soap weight for my recipe around 52 ounces. Next up was figuring out what recipe to use.

I went back read and watched the tutorial again and decided to use one of Amy's recipes with substitutions as a guide, swapping out certain ingredients for comparable ones.

I got right to work making the smaller batch for piping. It came to medium trace very quickly. I separated out the soap into my measuring cups so that I could color it with the mica that I had selected for my flowers. Once I had the mica in, I began trying to stir it into the soap. The batter had seriously gotten way to firm to even stir and mix the micas in. AARRGHH! I said a few choice words then scraped the hard soap into a mold to rebatch at a later date. Now, thinking back Amy used the recipe above for the Russian tips. I remember her saying that the soap batter needed to be pretty stiff for those tips. Well, I don't have any Russian tips so I looked through my soap recipes and decided to use my shea butter recipe. I resized it into the amounts for piping and for the cupcakes. Time to start all over and make the soap for piping flowers. This time, I went ahead and premixed all the mica I had chosen which was yellow vibrance, orange vibrance, my coral mica, red vibrance, wisteria purple, kumbo green and super sparkles mica. The bright orange is a combination of orange vibrance and my coral mica. The maroonish color on the far right is a combination of red vibrance, my coral mica and wisteria purple. Super sparkles mica went in with the orange, yellow and maroon colors.

I also prepared my piping bags, tips and I cut small squares of freezer paper to place the piped flowers on.

Time to make soap. I was much happier with the results from my shea butter recipe. I had plenty of time to mix colors and get the soap into the piping bags.

I used the technique of using saran wrap, placing the soap on, spreading it out, then adding the second color on top to achieve the dual color when piping.

Ready or not here I come, super greenie with all this cake decorating stuff. I've never piped anything but a star and they were ugly. Here goes nothing. I began by applying a tiny amount of soap on the cake nail, then added a square of freezer paper. I then piped a small swirl of the white (uncolored) soap for a base to start making the flowers. Next the dual color for petals. I kept making more and more flowers. Some were pretty ugly and got scraped back into the bag. Maroon flowers, yellow-orange flowers and leaves over and over. I think I must have spent over two hours messing with them. I finally had to stop because I couldn't squeeze the soap out of the bags anymore so I started to clean up the huge mess that I had made. I really made a BIG mess! All the soap that was left in the bags I put in with the other soap for rebatching. I think I have a good two and a half pounds of soap from that just from today.

I had to soak the piping tips overnight. No fun doing dishes. I left my flowers on the table to firm and harden up before I made the cupcake part of the soap.

The next morning I gathered my ingredients for the shea butter cupcake soap. I used one tablespoon of ground oats, one teaspoon of French yellow clay and the fragrance oil I chose was oatmeal milk and honey which I purchased at Natures Garden.

I have two tips ready for piping the "glue" to stick my flowers on with. I couldn't decide which one at first but ended up using the open star tip. I am wishing it was larger now.

My oils and lye are ready to go. Time to stick blend.

Once I had trace, I added the ground oats and incorporated them in. I poured off around six ounces for the "glue", then continued on adding the yellow clay and fragrance oil.

The batter was thicker than the batch I had made for piping. Obviously, the fragrance oil helped that out. I filled up the cupcake liners and smoothed the tops and put the other soap I had measured off into the piping bag.

I piped a circular mound on top of the cupcakes one at a time, then added the flowers and leaves that I made, arranging them the best I could. Ultimately, I am not really happy with what I made, but I sure learned a lot.

So here's some pictures of them after I finished. I will pick out the best ones and take close up pictures for my entry.

Here they are out of the silicone liners and cleaned up. I kept spraying them with alcohol to get rid of the ash. I think this will be as good as mine will get for this soapy challenge.