Today’s DIY is a whippy, lightweight, fast-absorbing Cranberry Orange Whipped Body Butter—and it’s also our last cranberry orange DIY of the 2019 holiday making season! You’ll only need four simple ingredients and some electric beaters to whip up this body butter. Pair it with some other DIY’ed cranberry orange goodies for a lovely gift set… or just keep it for yourself because it’s pretty awesome 😉

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The bulk of this Cranberry Orange Whipped Body Butter is two oils: mango butter and cranberry seed oil. Soft, fast-absorbing mango butter provides the soft structure of the body butter, and cranberry seed oil softens it just enough so it stays whippy and workable. The ratio between these two fats is really important for achieving the proper consistency, and figuring/fiddling that out is where I spent the bulk of the development time for this formulation.

I’m often asked if projects like this will melt in hot weather. The short answer is “yes”—you can find the long answer written out in this FAQ. If you live somewhere significantly hotter (10°C+) than I do (the inside of my home is approximately 21°C/70°F… the outside is much colder at this time of year, brr), you’re likely going to want to take a few steps back in the formulation process to ensure the butter/liquid oil ratio works for you and your climate. I’d start by combining 70–75% mango butter and 25–30% cranberry seed oil (I find a 30–40g batch is good for working through this), melting, chilling, and whipping until light and fluffy. Leave the mixture to set up for about 12 hours and then check the consistency. If it’s too hard, add a gram of cranberry seed oil (for a 40g batch—roughly 4%), re-whip, and check again in another 12 or so hours. If it’s too soft, re-melt to incorporate more mango butter, chill, whip, and wait. Repeat this process, taking careful notes about all your additions, until you’re happy with the butter consistency after it’s been sitting undisturbed for about 12 hours. Pretty much anything can have a lovely whippy consistency directly after whipping—what we want is one that keeps that consistency. Once you’ve got a whipped concoction you’re happy with, refer back to your notes and do some math to figure out what the final percentages are. Reduce the liquid oil amount to make room for the vitamin E and orange essential oil, and then you should be good to go 😊

I chose mango butter as the base butter thanks to its soft, fast-absorbing consistency. I don’t recommend swapping it out as it is the core reason this body butter sinks into the skin quickly without leaving the skin feeling greasy or sticky. The cranberry seed oil has, of course, been starring in all of our cranberry orange formulations—it brings its lovely skin feel, tangy scent, and soft yellow colour to this whipped body butter.

Once we’ve got our whippy, buttery base all that’s left is including a titch of vitamin E oil to extend the shelf life of the butter, and some sweet orange essential oil to round out our scent blend. When it comes to packaging, I find this whipped butter takes up about another 50% space for its weight—that is, a 40g batch will need about 60mL of space. It’s not an exact thing, but that should give you a good starting point for choosing containers and batch sizes. Now—let’s get whippy!

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Cranberry Orange Whipped Body Butter

Heated phase
14.2g | 35.5% cranberry seed oil
25.2g | 63% mango butter (USA / Canada)

Cool down phase
0.4g | 1% orange essential oil
0.2g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)

Prepare a water bath by bringing about 3cm/1″ of water to a bare simmer over low to medium-low heat in a small saucepan.

Weigh the heated phase ingredients into a small heat-resistant bowl that’s deep and large enough for whipping in. Place the bowl in the water bath to melt the butter through. Once the mixture has liquified, remove the bowl from the heat.

Now it’s time to chill the mixture. I placed it in the freezer for about five minutes, swirled it, and froze it for another five or so minutes. You don’t want the body butter to be rock hard, but it should be solid on the edges with a slightly gooey center. When you get there, it’s time to whip it!

Grab your electric beaters and whip away for about one minute, and then scrape down the sides before whipping for another two or so minutes. I find you’ll notice a big increase is viscosity during this second blending. Continue to scrape down the bowl and whip until the body butter is light (both in consistency and colour) and makes quite soft, marshmallowy folds when you stir it. At that point in time, leave the body butter to come fully to room temperature—how long this takes will depend on batch size. I left my 40g batch for about 3 hours. If you set this up so you can leave it overnight, that’ll work as well.

Once it’s settled at room temperature, give it a poke and make sure you’re still happy with the consistency—that it hasn’t melted into a puddle or anything unpleasant (side note: if you are swapping out the mango butter or otherwise fiddling with the core butter/oil ratios, you’ll want to leave the whipped butter for at least 12 hours to ensure it’s not seizing up—as I was developing this formula I was leaving the whipped butters for days to test the ratios… this is the territory you’ll be in if you don’t like the consistency after an hour. If you live somewhere quite hot, please read this.). If you’re happy with the consistency, we can incorporate our cool down ingredients and move on!

To weigh out the cool down ingredients you’ll need to use an accurate scale as they are present at very low amounts—preferably a scale accurate to 0.01g. As these more accurate scales tend to have fairly low (100–200g) maximum weights you likely won’t be able to put the entire batch of body butter on that scale without blowing it out (if you can, go for it!). So—grab a smaller dish. Add a scoop or two of body butter, and then weigh the cool down ingredients into that, using the more accurate scale. Stir to thoroughly incorporate, and then transfer that back into the master batch of body butter. Whip that all together.

Gently spoon the finished body butter into a jar, taking care not to squash it too much. I used a 120mL glass jar and that held almost all of an 80g batch (as written in grams this is a 40g batch, so you’d need to double it to fill a 120mL jar or use a 60mL jar instead). And that’s it! To use, massage into skin that could use some pampering and enjoy. Make sure you store the body butter in a temperature somewhat similar to the one in which it was made—it will readily melt if exposed to high temperatures, and it won’t have that lovely whippy consistency when it re-solidifies.

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this body butter is 100% oil-based, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 40g.
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this recipe, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• If you want to use a different soft butter, you’ll likely need to re-develop the formulation to get the correct butter to oil ratio. Read the pre-amble for details.
• I don’t recommend swapping out the cranberry seed oil, but if you have to I’d choose a mid-to-light weight liquid oil that your skin loves.
• You can use a different essential oil or fragrance oil.
• You can also leave out the essential oil, replacing it with more cranberry seed oil.
• I used cranberry seeds to add some visual interest for the photos—I do not recommend actually sprinkling the top of the body butter with cranberry seeds & they are all kinds of exfoliating… I had to scoop ’em off and throw them out after taking the photos. If you want a note of red, a sprinkle of red mica on the surface of the body butter would be a much better idea (note to past self, ha).