I started with a recipe I found on the Internet, but have tweaked it quite a bit over the years and am pretty happy with the consistency I get. This product is not heat stable; it melts in the summer. I tend to make a batch, always share a jar (for good luck!), and keep the jars I'm not using in the fridge until I need them.
Ingredients
1 cup shea butter
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup almond oil
1/2 cup olive oil (or you can use 1 cup almond oil)
1 tablespoon arrowroot powder
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon essential oil or fragrance of your choice
Notes about ingredients
The
original recipe called for cocoa butter or shea butter. I find cocoa
butter hard to work with, and it has a very specific smell that is hard
to mask -- unless you are using mint essential oil, in which case it
smells like chocolate mint! I haven't used cocoa butter in a few years.
I
ordered a huge hunk of shea butter off the internet. It's much easier
than scooping it out of a container. Now I just carve it off the block
and force it into a measuring cup to get the right proportion.
The original recipe called for 1 cup of almond oil and no olive oil. Then one time I ran out of almond oil, so I used 1/2 cup almond oil and 1/2 cup olive oil. It was my best batch ever -- and makes the recipe slightly cheaper to make as well.
In the spring and fall, I use vanilla and sweet orange oil to scent the butter (1/4 teaspoon each). Around Thanksgiving, I use cardamom and vanilla. And Christmas body butter is always vanilla peppermint.
Steps
1. Prepare your surface. I throw a big towel on top of our island to soak up all the oil, because this can get messy.
2. Chisel the shea butter and coconut oil out of their containers and put them in a glass measuring cup. Microwave in 30 second intervals until it is melted.
3. Put the melted shea butter and coconut oil into the bowl of your stand mixer. Add the liquid oils and stir to combine.
4. Put the bowl in the freezer for 20 or 30 minutes -- until the oils
start to congeal. The edges of the oil get kind of white. The goal isn't to solidify it -- just to chill it, so that it will become whipped. Warm fats don't whip well.
| This is what the oil should look like out of the freezer. |
5. Remove from freezer and add the arrowroot powder and essential oils.
6. Use the whisk attachment to aerate the body butter on medium to high for 8 to 12 minutes -- until the body butter forms peaks, almost like whipped cream. You want to make sure that the butter is actually stiff because it's whipped, not just because it's cold. That's why the range. Aim for 10 minutes, with at least 5 of that being on high. Use a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides every 2 or 3 minutes.
7. Use a rubber spatula to spoon the butter into mason jars. 8. Refrigerate all the jars for a couple of hours (Is this step necessary? I don't know!) and then remove and use each jar as needed. Enjoy!
