Chocolate Body Butter

This Chocolate Body Butter Recipe is very easy to make and gives a soft, fluffy cream that melts easily onto your skin and is perfect for nourishing dry skin. I wanted to make some body butter for gifts and had an unsuccessful attempt at trying a more complicated recipe for Rich Rose Geranium Body Butter, so I decided to make a quick and easy variation of the Mango Body Butter Recipe I had made previously.

As I’m trying out different recipes for various natural skin and hair care products, I’m starting to learn the difference between creams, balms, and butters. Balms and butters differ from creams in that they don’t have any water added so they don’t need any preservative. Even though this isn’t officially a ‘cream’, it is a soft, fluffy, creamy butter that is a delight to make and use.

250g cocoa butter
100g shea butter
50g sweet almond oil
20 drops vanilla oil (optional)

I used natural cocoa butter that had a rich chocolaty smell so I didn’t use any further essential oils. If you prefer you can use deodorized cocoa butter and then add essential oils to give your scent of choice.

Melt cocoa butter and shea butter together in a double boiler. This is quite quick.

Remove from the heat and leave to cool. This will take a while. After about 20 minutes when it was considerably cooler but still liquid, I put the bowl in the fridge. It took about an hour to start to turn solid but still soft.

Add the essential oils. Adjust the amount of almond oil if you want a firmer ‘butter’.

Use an electric hand mixer to whip until it is fluffy. Most of the recipes for other cosmetics use a stick mixer but that doesn’t work for this, you need to use an electric beater to get it really fluffy.

Spoon into pots. I got my cosmetics pots from Arthur Holmes.