Whipped Body Butter

I have tried several recipes for whipped body butter since November when I started putting them together for Christmas gifts, and I have tweaked, modified, and played with the ingredients until I found what works best for me and my non-KitchenAid using self. I submit the following:

• 2 parts coconut oil
• 1 part shea butter
• essential oil to “taste” (some oils are strong enough that fewer drops are needed than others)

For this batch I used just over 1/2 cup of coconut oil and just over 1/4 cup of shea butter.

Initially, I wanted to make a “just coconut oil” whipped body butter, but found the consistency weird after whipping it, so after some tweaking, I found that a 2 to 1 ratio worked beautifully.

I measured out, unmelted, what looked to be almost 3/4 cup of solid coconut oil, placed it into a Pyrex measuring cup and stuck it in the microwave and heated it at 35 seconds on high as many times as it took to melt to liquid. In my case, it took four times. I poured this into a metal bowl.

I then measured out, unmelted, what was almost 1/2 cup, maybe a little bit less, of shea butter. Now everything I’ve read says to use unrefined shea butter, but I happened to have refined on hand and have nothing BUT success with it. At any rate, it takes a little bit longer to melt the shea butter (about four zaps in the microwave on high for 45 seconds), but once done, I stirred it into the metal bowl with the coconut oil and placed it in the refrigerator.

You’ll want to keep the bowl in the fridge until the mixture becomes somewhat solidified and opaque. The first time I did this I OVER-chilled my mixture and had to re-melt it. There should be soft spots in the bowl, and you should be able to press a finger into the surface and leave a fingerprint. (I am kicking myself for not taking pictures at this point. I apologize.)

Once it gets to that point, take it out of the fridge and whip it with your hand mixer. I don’t have a KitchenAid stand mixer with the attachment that aerates (although it IS on my wish list), but I found that my regular, run of the mill mixer works great, especially if I mix on the highest setting.

I have also found that it may take two or more “mix, chill” sessions to get the consistency just right.

This is what today’s batch looked like after mixing twice:

Then I added about 40 drops of lemon essential oil to the fluff. I found lemon and the other citrus oils require more than lavender, rosemary or other herbal oils to get the same fragrance level.

I mixed in the oil, and was ready to spoon this into jars.

This recipe almost tripled in size. I started with 3/4 cup of melted oil/butter and ended up with 2 1/4 cup of whipped body butter.

If you try this, please let me know what you think.