I am in LOVE with these wee pumpkins that I made! I immediately decided that they needed to go on top of cupcakes. I’m going to show you how to make these little pumpkins and how to pipe these adorable soaps.
Soap Dough Pumpkins
I simply made the pumpkins out of soap that I had piped during this Facebook Live. I sacrificed a few of my failed pipings and rolled them into pumpkins. The soap was still nice and soft and pliable. You can also intentionally make soap dough. Learn more about soap dough here.
I am not the best soap dough artist! HA! But…I figured pumpkins would be easy enough. I searched YouTube for clay pumpkin tutorials and found a ton of great tutorials. Here are the steps I followed.
Make a round ball of orange soap. Slightly squish the top and bottom, giving it more of a pumpkin shape.
Use a toothpick (or something similar) to press in the vertical lines around the pumpkin as shown.
Add a brown stem and a leaf if you want!
I made six because I knew I was making six cupcakes! Being that I’m not very good at clay work, I was pretty pleased! They’ll work!
Now, let’s make the cupcakes! The recipe I’m using is My Favorite Piping Recipe from my eCourse, Piping Perfection! This eCourse teaches you EVERYTHING about piping soap. I give you information on formulating the perfect piping recipe, show you how to pipe on cupcakes and loaves and how to pipe individual flowers.
You can use your own recipe, just get it to that perfect piping consistency! If you’d like mine, sign up for the eCourse here.
I made these cupcakes in two 450 gram oil batches. That perfectly makes six bottoms and six tops (if you have equal amounts of bottom soap to top soap). I made them with two separate batches because I added pumpkin puree to the bottoms, but didn’t want it in the tops. I wanted the tops nice and white. Here’s how I made them!
Let’s make soap! If you are new to soapmaking, be sure to download our free guide, How to Make Cold Process Soap! Gear up in your gloves and your safety glasses.
First, we’ll make our bottoms using pumpkin puree. If you buy canned pumpkin, be sure it is 100% pumpkin and not pumpkin pie filling. 🙂 You can replace 100% of your water with pumpkin for making your lye solution.
Step 1: Create a lye solution. Weigh the pumpkin puree and lye into two separate containers. Slowly pour the sodium hydroxide into the pumpkin while stirring. Stir until completely dissolved and set aside to cool. Your pumpkin will easily liquefy as the sodium hydroxide dissolved in it. As it sits for a bit, it might thicken. This is normal!
Step 2: Prepare the base oils. First, weigh any solid oils and butters into a container and melt. You can melt using the microwave or low heat on a burner. Next, weigh each liquid oil into the melted oils. The liquid oils will cool down the melted oils and leave you with a base oil mixture that is about at the correct temperature to make soap. It might still need to cool down a bit.
Step 3: Weigh your essential oil or fragrance oil into a glass or stainless steel container and add to your base oils.
Step 4: Prepare your cupcake base molds! I’m using plastic lined treat cups from the craft store.
Step 5: Check the temperatures. You should now have a container containing liquid base oils and a container containing pumpkin lye solution. Take the temperatures using an infra-red temperature gun. Be sure to stir each mixture before taking the temp. You want your temperatures to be between 80-110° F.
Step 6: Once you have reached desired temperatures, pour the lye solution into the oil mixture and mix to trace.
Step 7: Pour the base into your cupcake bottom molds and flatten as best you can.
Next, we’ll make the cupcake tops!
Step 1: Create a lye solution using water and sodium hydroxide.
Step 2: Prepare the base oils. I added white mica to my base oils.
Step 3: Weigh your essential oil or fragrance oil into a glass or stainless steel container and add to your base oils.
Step 4: Prepare your piping bag. I’m using a large closed star tip.
Step 5: Check the temperatures. You should now have a container containing liquid base oils and a container containing pumpkin lye solution. Take the temperatures using an infra-red temperature gun. Be sure to stir each mixture before taking the temp. You want your temperatures to be between 90-110° F.
Step 6: Once you have reached desired temperatures, pour the lye solution into the oil mixture and mix to thick trace.
I decided against white and wanted a very light blue or green. I added blue, but since my soap was tinted a bit yellow, I got a very nice pastel green.
Step 7: Allow your soap to thicken to a consistency that is easily piped and holds it’s shape.
Step 8: Pipe your cupcake soaps using a simple cupcake swirl.
Step 9: Place your pumpkin embeds on top of each cupcake, smooshing it down gently.
Step 10: I dusted mine with a bit of glitter!
Step 11: Let your soap harden and saponify for at least 24 hours.
Step 12: Cure your soap for 4-6 weeks.
Please share on Pinterest! 🙂 Thank you!
Can you share the actual soap recipe you use for this?
These are so adorable, Amanda! I just love how they are so festive looking. Do you think a pumpkin fragrance would darken the pumpkin color of the bottom? Thank you for your generosity and fun blogs!