Making Mini Dessert Soaps!

For this month’s Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge Club, Amy Chose mini dessert soaps! (Just for reference, that is a dinner plate the soaps were photographed on.) The challenge included an excellent tutorial by guest teacher Cee Gorden. Since I got second place last month for my Forest Bark soap, my admission to the club this month was FREE! (Gotta love free!)

So, I talked to my husband and kiddos about what their favorite desserts were, just to get some ideas. They really like dessert! So, then I had to combine all the ideas with my mental images and then crunch the ideas into something I could actually achieve using soap. I loved the idea of making a tiny wedding cake, so I knew that would be one. Then I knew I needed a tart of some kind. The contest requires four mini desserts, so I was halfway there, and I figured the other ideas would come as I started on the first two.

Wedding Cake Soap

This soap uses little CP soaps that I made in measuring cups. The soap is a creamy white and smells tropical/fruity (Butt Naked from Nature’s Garden). Then I used Cee Gordon’s recipe for making fondant from melt and pour soap and started working on the fondant stripes to go around the cakes. This was very tricky!! If you watch my video, you will see me rolling that stuff out over and over again. Every time it stuck to something-either the mat, or the rolling pin, or my fondant mat. I kept adding more and more corn starch, and finally, it started behaving. Getting the pretty little pattern from my fondant mat onto the cake was definitely the hardest part of this challenge for me. The brown fondant is colored with cocoa powder, and the CP soap has coconut oil in it. (We needed to use at lease one food item in this challenge). Finally, I sculpted a little flower and leaves out of the fondant, and then added sugar pearls to decorate the middle layer. The little “cake mat” underneath is a coaster that I found at the dollar store. 🙂

Blueberry Tart

I finally settled on using blueberries for this tart, because I thought I would be able to do a good job on the color and shape of these. It took FOREVER to make these berries! The tart is tiny, and it doesn’t look like it would hold that many blueberries, but I felt like I was rolling out those little balls for a really long time. (Maybe it was the fact that my family was clamoring for dinner at the time?? “Mommy’s almost done, honey. Just a few more minutes . . .”). Then I started working on the crust. I added turmeric, cocoa powder, and mica to get the tannish color. Then I used my finger to rub some mica over the edges to give it the look of being cooked. Finally, I added some blue mica to clear M&P soap to get the saucy look that the blueberries needed. It looks so real!! I have had to explain that it is soap and therefore not edible to my 4 year old three times now.

White Chocolate Truffles

Every year, when my mom and I go Christmas shopping, we always seem to stop by a chocolate store and get truffles. I have always loved white chocolate, and that’s where the inspiration for these truffles came from. I used mini ice cube trays as my mold for these, and these are from the same CP soap batch as the wedding cakes. These were so much simpler than the first two desserts! I just melted some MP soap and added cocoa powder and brown sparkly mica and drizzled it over the top. Ta Dah!!

Creme Brulee Soap

Last, but not least is this decadent delight! It just so happened that one of the little CP soap cakes that I made in a measuring cup fit perfectly into a ramekin that I had in my kitchen. Immediately, I knew this was going to be creme brulee. I took one of the mini ice mold CP soap pieces and dipped it into red decorating sugar, then I made ONE MORE blueberry (I know!!!) and then took a leaf from my favorite tree in the back yard. Then I mixed some cocoa powder and mica with some organic sugar and sprinkled it on top of the cake and spritzed with water to make it look carmelized.

So, that is my dessert soap making journey! It was fun, but I rebelled the whole time because it was soap for art’s sake and not for actual body washing. My thrifty spirit was fighting me every step of the way! Eventually, I satisifed both my practical side and my artistic side by telling myself this: The wedding cake can be taken apart, and each layer used as soap. The creme brulee can be taken out of the ramekin and used. The truffles actually make fantastic travel soaps (no more public restroom soap for me, thank you!). And the blueberry tart? Well, that one is just for looks. Three outta four ain’t bad. 🙂