The inspiration for this soap comes from the real chocolate cake that I bake for my husband’s birthday every year.
It is his favorite chocolate cake and at some point he even forbade me from making it for anyone else (it wouldn’t be special other wise, he claimed). He likes it so much that some years I bake two cakes, one for the family gathering, and another one just for him, that we cut into pieces and freeze them so he can eat them throughout the year.
One time he brought some leftover cake for his coworkers (back when they all work from an office), and one of his coworkers took her piece home for her husband, and it also became his favorite cake. His wife asked me to make this cake for him last year, it was my first commissioned cake!
If you are curious about the recipe for this cake, you can find it in this book and it is called Devil’s Food cake (being the opposite of an Angel’s food cake). And I pair it with the Dark chocolate frosting from the same book. I get the most consistent results by weighing the ingredients and using the best ingredients I can afford (which means the fancy Kerrigold butter for the frosting, and the Ghirardelli cocoa powder and baking chocolate). I took some videos of the process of making it and included them in the video below.
For the soap version, I tried to give it the same two layer look with frosting in the middle. I did not want to color it though, so I left the vanillin discoloration in the fragrance do what it does best; turn the soap brown!
Here is the recipe and video below:
Needed Ingredients
| Ingredient | Gram(s) | Ounce(s) | Pounds(s) | Oil % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coconut Oil, 76 deg | 182.57 | 6.44 | 0.40 | 23% |
| Ricinus Oil (Castor Oil) | 47.63 | 1.68 | 0.11 | 6% |
| Karite Butter (Shea) | 87.32 | 3.08 | 0.19 | 11% |
| Olive Oil – All Grades | 246.07 | 8.68 | 0.54 | 31% |
| Tallow, Beef | 214.32 | 7.56 | 0.47 | 27% |
| Cocoa Butter | 15.88 | 0.56 | 0.04 | 2% |
| Ingredient | Gram(s) | Ounce(s) | Pounds(s) | Batch % |
| NaOH (5% Superfat) | 104.31 | 3.68 | 0.23 | 9.19% |
| KOH (5% Superfat) | 7.72 | 0.27 | 0.02 | 0.68% |
| Water (34% Lye + 66% Water Solution) | 217.48 | 7.67 | 0.48 | 19.17% |
| Total Oils | 793.79 | 28 | 1.75 | 69.95% |
| Soap Weight (Pre-Cook) | 1,134.74 | 40.03 | 2.50 | 100% |
Mold:
Fragrance:
- 1.40 oz of Dark Rich Chocolate fragrance from Brambleberry (which actually, I would not use again by itself. After its reformulation, I do not like it as much as before)
- 0.40 oz of chocolate fragrance oil from Crafter’s choice for 10 oz of soap
Embeds
To make the embeds I used soap dough
- Chocolate heart embeds: you can watch how I made them here.
Equipment
Safety Equipment:
Respirator (I use this when mixing the lye, I mix the lye in the window sill, window opened, with a pedestal fan blowing the fumes away, better yet, freeze your distilled water prior) I also try to wear long sleeves, pants and closed shoes. In my personal experience, most of my near misses (when I feel my skin itching or a slight burning sensation), or when I come contact with the soap batter, have happened when I am wiping down the containers, when I am almost done.
Facial Shield (I use either a facial shield or the goggles below)
Last Thoughts
I normally use vanilla stabilizer on my soaps, and this time I embraced the vanilla discoloration instead. Now that the soaps are ready to use and have tested them, I am having second thoughts! They bleed brown! Which stands in contrast with our white shower floor. I do not think it will stain but it creates for an interesting shower experience.
I am disappointed by the fragrance, I remember it being more chocolatey before. My guess is that because of the reformulation many fragrances went through after the 49th amendment to the IFRA guidelines, the scent has changed. So I am still on the search of the best chocolate fragrance. So far, I have been the happiest with the one from New direction aromatics (called simply Chocolate fragrance oil). Is there a chocolate fragrance you would recommend?
Soaps by Glenda 