How to make whipped body butter

Making whipped Shea butter really is incredibly easy, using two ingredients - shea butter and oil - and your mixer! First step? Choosing your shea butter!

There are a few different types. Raw can feel crumbly and harder with a nutty or smokey smell to refined or ultra refined, which can be quite white, soft, and almost odourless.

Golden shea can be crumbly and slightly earthy smelling. The final consistency of the product will depend on the type of shea you choose. (I prefer the softness of ultra refined over raw.)

Shea butter tends to be greasy feeling, so choose your oil carefully! If you like a less greasy skin feel, consider using oils like hazelnut, macadamia, or grapeseed.

I like a greasier feeling product, so I like to use rice bran oil. It has a great balance of linoleic and oleic fatty acids, lots of phytosterols, and Vitamin E with a shelf life of up to 12 months.

If you want to make a 100% shea whipped butter, consider using shea oil, a fractionated liquid oil. You can find it in light to medium weight versions. It is a greasy feeling oil.

Choosing oils is important and I only have so much space, so please visit http://swiftcraftymonkey.blogspot.ca/p/oil-butter-posts.html for loads of information on oils and butters.

Before you start, get your ingredients and equipment ready. For the first step, you will want your shea butter, oil, heatproof jug, and digital scale.

When we make bath & body products, we weigh our ingredients for better accuracy in measuring. 1 gram of water weighs 1 ml, but 1 gram of oil doesn't weigh 1 ml, but closer to 0.9 grams.

Weigh out 80 grams shea butter and 19 grams oil into your jug. We'll add the fragrance or essential oil after the product cools.

Heat until the shea butter has just melted. The more melty it is, the more cooling it needs, and the longer you'll have to wait before whipping it! Remove from the heat and put in the freezer to cool.

My pictures showing me weighing out the butter and oil and the heating were just awful, so I used another picture for heating. You won't have those white bits floating in your product!

Remove your jug from the freezer when you see it has this crust forming. It should look creamy, not clear, like this.

Add 1 gram fragrance or essential oil, then whip it (whip it good!). Whip until it doubles in size.

Your whipped butter should look like this, whipped and fluffy. The colour will vary with the type of butter and oil you've chosen.

This is ultra refined shea butter with fractionated coconut oil.

This is golden shea butter with jojoba oil.

If you want to make that cute swirl on the top of the butter, load a piping bag with a 1M tip and squeeze it in the jar. I tend to move the icing bag in a circle as I squeeze it. Use any tip you like!

If you don't want to pipe it, spoon it in and smooth the top.

Summary! Weigh out 19 grams oil and shea butter into the jug. Heat until just melted. Put in freezer until it thickens. Whip. Put into piping bag and pipe into jar, or spoon it in. Rejoice!

Please make a cute label to let everyone know that this is a whipped shea butter and not icing! My husband always bemoans that my version with cupcake fragrance looks good enough to eat!

Want to make more than 100 grams? Double or triple or dodecaduple the recipe! Just remember it will double in size, so 100 grams will make somewhere around 170 ml (5 2/3 oz).

Want to learn more? I have hundreds of bath & body recipes at Point of Interest at http://swiftcraftymonkey.blogspot.ca/ along with reference posts on oils, butters, and so much more!