It’s time for our last Christmas soap of the season! This one is inspired by the eternal fruitcake—that lump of sherry soaked brick-like substance that appears on Christmas potluck dessert tables every year (it may be the exact same lump, if we’re being honest). I know few people that admit to liking fruitcake, and even fewer that actually make the stuff. (I expect to hear from everybody who likes and/or makes fruitcake in the comments section to prove me wrong).
Anyhow, I thought I’d make a Fruitcake soap to add to world’s supply of dense slices embedded with flecks of green, red, and yellow. The multicolour bit requires a bit more effort, but hey—it’s Christmas, right? It’s also a pretty neat effect.
The coloured bits are soap batch #1; we’ll make it up, and divide it into three parts. Each part will be a different color, and then we’ll pour it and let it saponify for a day or two before slicing them into little cubes and leaving them to age for however long you have.
When you’ve got time to make batch #2, we’ll whip that up and suspend our little colourful cubes in it. Once that’s saponified, you’re ready to slice it, age it up, and pat yourself on your back for getting wrapping up your Christmas soaping!
Fruitcake Soap
25% olive oil (pomace) (USA / Canada)
25% refined coconut oil (USA / Canada)
30% beef tallow
15% unrefined shea butter (USA / Canada)
5% castor oil (USA / Canada)Per 500g (1.1lbs) oils:
- 1 pinch tussah silk or ½ tsp silk peptides
- 2 tsp sodium lactate (USA / Canada) (optional—hardens the bars)
- 1 tbsp white white kaolin clay (USA / Canada)
For the colourful cubes:
- Red iron oxide
- Green chromium oxide
- Yellow iron oxide
For the suspending batch, per 500g oils:
- 2 tsp vanilla specks/flecks
- 20g benzoin essential oil
- 10g cinnamon bark essential oil
2020 update: Given the irritation potential for cinnamon essential oil, I’d recommend using a cinnamon-y fragrance oil rather than the essential oil. Please refer to supplier documentation for maximum usage rates for the particular fragrance oil you’re using when used in soap/rinse-off products.
First off, you’ll want to decide how much soap you’re going to make when all is said and done. I used a big silicone cake pan I found at a rummage sale for my final mould, which held about 12 cups/2.84L of batter. That works out to a batch of soap with about 1850g oils. I figured that out by punching by formula by percents into SoapCalc, fiddling with the total weight of oils, and noting the “soap weight before CP cure or HP cook” value. Once that weight (by grams) was fairly close to my volume (by milliliters), that was my total batch size. You could also do some fancy-pants cross multiplication, but my fiddling way works, too 😉
My funky soap mould/cake pan.
I’d recommend a pretty good sized batch—definitely nothing less than 1000g. This is because you’re going to want reasonable amounts of the three colours to work with so you can blend in the colourants with an immersion blender without worrying about splattering yourself with raw soap batter. This whole soap is also a reasonable amount of work, so you might as well get a good batch of gifts out of it. All that said, it’s probably best if you’re a reasonably confident soap maker so you can be sure you won’t stuff anything up and end up chucking a seriously large batch of soap.
OK, so—you’ve got your total batch size decided. Divide it in half. One half will be made first and turned into our wee coloured cubes. The second half will be made later on, to suspend our colourful cubes in.
For the cubes
Use SoapCalc to calculate your final amounts of oils, lye, and water for the colourful cubes batch—half of your total batch.
Follow my standard soap making instructions. Add the tussah silk to the lye water, pulling it apart into smaller bits to encourage it to dissolve. If using, add the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) to the lye water after it has cooled and stir to combine. If you’re using the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) I strongly encourage you let your fats and lye water come to room temperate before combining. I haven’t tried using the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) above room temperature, but I do notice a much, much faster trace than I would usually get at room temperature, and it’ll only get faster at higher temperatures.
Once your soap batter has reached trace, blend in the clay. Then, divide the batter between three small bowls. Make sure the bowls are small enough that the batter is deep enough to submerge your immersion blender in the batter without splattering. Add a wee bit (I used about ¼ tsp of each colour) of green chromium oxide to one bowl, red to another, and yellow to the last.
Using an immersion blender (important! Don’t do this without a blender if you want even, uniform colour), blend the oxides into their respective third of the batch, ensuring you break up all the clods for even colour. You can always add more oxide, so start low and work your way up. Aim for a pastel shade as I’ve found too many oxides can cause glycerin rivers.
Once blended, pour your colours into three different moulds (I used my cavity moulds and ended up with three oval bars of each colour) and let them saponify for at least 24 hours before removing from the moulds and chopping them up into a pile of colourful cubes. I ended up leaving my bars for about two weeks before slicing, which seems ill-advised, but they ended up still being easy to slice at that point, and less sticky than a younger soap would be. My bits were roughly 1cm cubes.
For the suspending batch
Using the same calculations as you did for your cubes batch, measure out your oils, lye, and water. Follow my standard soap making instructions. Add the tussah silk to the lye water, pulling it apart into smaller bits to encourage it to dissolve. If using, add the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) to the lye water after it has cooled and stir to combine. If you’re using the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) I strongly encourage you let your fats and lye water come to room temperate before combining. I haven’t tried using the sodium lactate (USA / Canada) above room temperature, but I do notice a much, much faster trace than I would usually get at room temperature, and it’ll only get faster at higher temperatures.
Once your soap batter has reached trace, blend in the clay, essential oils, and vanilla specks. Now, we need a really thick trace for this batch—think of those pudding cups you might have had as a kid. This soap needs to be thick enough to suspend your cubes, and this can take a while. Once mine reached trace I’d blend some more, and then I prepared my mould. Then I blended some more and went and ate lunch. Eventually, after perhaps half an hour, I had a super thick soap batter. I tested it by dropping a cube in and waiting a while to see if it started to sink.
Now that you’ve got soap pudding batter, stir in all your cubes. It’ll be pretty chunky. Now, to mould! Spoon some of the mixture into your mould a little at a time, knocking the mould sharply against your counter top to knock out any air bubbles as you go. Air bubbles are a big problem with batter this thick, so that’s why we’re doing spoon-knock-spoon-knock-repeat. Once you’ve filled your mould, smooth off the top as best you can (or perhaps do some fancy sculpting if that sounds like fun) and leave your soap to saponify for at least 24 hours. Because my mould was so big and a funny, floppy shape, I left it on my kitchen counter, uncovered, and that was totally fine. I waited closer to 36 hours before removing it from the mould, and then left it for another 36 or so before slicing. This is mostly because I was busy around the 24 hour mark, but it goes to show there’s plenty of flexibility there. Don’t worry if you don’t slice at exactly 24 hours.
Woo! Now all that’s left is letting your fruitcake age for a minimum of three weeks before gifting it. Enjoy and happy holidays!
Oh my, but this is adorable! And fruitcake is very like soap in that you want to make it with plenty of time to age before Christmas. I usually make a fruitcake the weekend after (American) Thanksgiving so it can age for four weeks before Christmas. I will have to tag this one for next year, as I have all my holiday soaps made already. My mother loves fruitcake and would get a kick out of this. Have you thought of adding orange or litsea to it to complicate the scent? I usually add orange and lime zest to my edible fruitcakes.
I love the idea of adding some orange EO! I was all out, but it didn’t even occur to me 😛 Great idea, Elizabeth 🙂
Nice idea! I still need to prove you are wrong – in my family we like to eat and bake fruit cakes for Christmas time. And if there is, for some reason, any cake left after Holidays, I use to make Tiramisu with left over ginger breads and cakes. 😀
That does sound lovely! 🙂
Love fruitcake, make fruitcake 🙂 but then I’m English … Very much enjoy force-feeding it to German relatives each year and watching them pretend (or not!) to enjoy it … But seriously, cake (yum) plus fruit (healthy) soaked in alcohol (even better!) … What’s not to like? The trick is to set the fruit to soak in something like whisky and then forget about it for several weeks … The resulting cake will brighten up any slow morning at the office 🙂
Fantastic blog, by the way! You’ve been a great inspiration.
Perhaps a Christmas trip to the UK is in order… for science. Fruitcake science 😉 Thanks for reading!
I am one of the few who love Fruitcake. I remember my mother making it two months in advance of Christmas and keeping it in the cupboard, occasionally adding brandy to it until she felt it had enough . It was always delicious.
Oooh, that does sound lovely! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi! I both make AND eat fruitcake, but it’s an exceptional recipe handed down from my grandmother. I’ve never had any other fruitcake that I cared for, including store brands, or homemade.
The soap looks like fun to make and use! It might be some Christmas gifts this year!
A good recipe can make all the difference, eh? Perhaps I shall have to start sampling homemade ones and see if I can hit the fruitcake jackpot 😉
Oh, I love fruitcake. My brother’s mother-in-law, Polly, used to make fruitcake. Polly was pure Cherokee Indian and she made the best fruitcake ever. If someone ever ate her fruitcake they would easily be a convert. Her cakes were never hard clumps. Dense? yes. But they were moist and absolutely delicious. And she used to make 40 or so of them every season, that’s how many folks “asked” for her cakes. As far as this soap goes, it looks wonderful, but a bit too advanced for me just yet. I’m going to make your “Creamy exfoliating cleanser” , lotion, and facial serum for gifts.
Wow, that’s a lot of fruitcake every year! She must have had an entire room dedicated to aging them 🙂
LOL, she actually made them in shifts. The first go ’round was about 20, then a week later she would make another 20. Yes, her husband put up this elaborate shelving system for her during the holidays. And this all took place in the tiniest kitchen you could ever imagine. I chuckle just thinking about it. I don’t know how she did it. Her tiny basement was packed to the gills with flour, candied fruit, bottles, tins and wrapping and so forth. She was also an accomplished gardener and grew the most beautiful orchids.
Wow, that’s dedication! I feel special when I bake a couple loaves of bread in a week, let alone 20 every week, whoa! I love hearing stories about amazing women like this 🙂
Yum … nothing like homemade fruitcake. I don’t think there is anyone in my family that doesn’t like fruitcake if it’s the homemade dark variety. Just saying … LOL
😀
wow this is amazing
thanks for sharing
Thanks, Angel!
Hi Marie, I was wondering if you have ever looked into hot process soap. It doesn’t have to age, for those people who need fast Christmas presents. I thought maybe you could come up with a recipe, since all of your soaps look so lovely!
Hi Maggie! I have, and I can’t say it really appeals to me. It involves a lot more active effort in the making stage, and I don’t love the packed mashed potatoes bit that happens at the end. Eh :/
Super creative idea!
Thanks, Kathryn!
I love that these soaps are inspired from fruitcake! A unique way to throw some holiday fun in your bars. =)
Thanks so much, Anne-Marie! That means a lot coming from a pro 😉
Looks easier to do and prettier than the blended fairy bread soap. The colors are more apparent. Bookmarked, and will try this one too!
Thank you HB&ME!
Thanks, Nora!
Can you convert the recipe to actual amounts vs percentages? Also, I don’t see where you listed lye amounts or water amounts. Have you ever used another oil instead of tallow?
You’ll find answers for all these things in the FAQ, but the short answer for everything is a general “nope” 🙂 (Note this line in the instructions: “Use SoapCalc to calculate your final amounts of oils, lye, and water”… 😉 )
So cute! Can you make a video about this soap? :*
Thanks! Honestly, probably not as I don’t need another batch of this stuff—I still have some from the first time I made it!