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Impressive looking, but simple enough for beginners, this easy pumpkin spice soap smells divine, and would make a perfect autumn gift.
Now that autumn has finally arrived, along with its cooler nights and shorter days, I’m already thinking about Halloween and Thanksgiving and all of the pumpkin and apple spice recipes that accompany them.
Last year, around this time, I had begun playing with making different types of soaps, and had a great idea for making an easy pumpkin spice soap, but couldn’t find the ingredients, mainly some spice essential oils, that I wanted to use anywhere nearby. I figured that if I ordered them online, pumpkin spice soap time would have already passed by the time that I could actually use the soap. My reasoning? While the saponification process, the process in which all of the lye and oils have chemically combined and made soap, completes within the first few days after making soap, you should wait a few weeks, for your soap to harden, before you actually use it. Otherwise the soap will be soft and will get used up too quickly.
This year, though, I’m better prepared. I bought the oils that I wanted to use to spice up my soap, and made a lovely soap with pumpkin and goat milk to bring in autumn.
Pumpkin and goat milk both add a little color to the soap, and they also add some hydration and richness. As for the spices, I chose to use both the dried spices themselves and the essential oils. The spices add a dark color to the soap, along with a beautiful aroma, and also add a very mild exfoliation. While I love this soap, and the way it smells, it is worth mentioning that the spices and their oils may be irritating for some people with sensitive skin.
If you have never made soap before, don’t worry. This soap is very simple to make. I purposely based this soap recipe on my beginner soap recipe. My beginner soap is a tried and true recipe that only uses simple, easy to find oils, and has a relatively long working time, so you should have plenty of time to add in your oils, spices, and can try to swirl them together like I did. Because you are working with milk, and are swirling two parts of the soap together, it is a bit more complicated than the other recipe. So, if you are nervous about it, begin with the other recipe. If you are adventurous, though, give this one a try! If you follow the directions carefully, even as a beginner, you shouldn’t have any problems.
As with all soap recipes, be very careful when working with lye and solutions using it!
Use protective eyewear and gloves, and mix your lye into your water, and not the other way around! It’s also a good idea to mix the ingredients outside or in a well ventilated area. You can read more tips on my beginner soap recipe.
OK, with all of that said, let’s make some easy pumpkin spice soap!!
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Easy Pumpkin Spice Soap
Materials
- 100 g sweet almond oil 3.5 oz.
- 100 g coconut oil 3.5 oz.
- 400 g olive oil 14.1 oz.
- 80 g lye 2.8 oz.
- 100 ml goat milk either fresh or reconstituted from powdered
- 100 ml water
- 45 g pumpkin 1.6 oz., I made my own puree
- 1 tsp. coconut sugar or any brown sugar
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 Tbsp. cinnamon
- 1 tsp. nutmeg
- 1 tsp. ground cloves
- clove essential oil & cinnamon and ginger essential oils
Instructions
- Mix together the water and goat milk. Then make your lye solution by adding the lye into the mixture of water and goat milk. Because adding lye causes the temperature to rise quickly, to prevent the milk from scalding, mix them together over a pan of ice and water. I also froze the goat milk, just to be sure, but if you are careful about mixing over ice, that shouldn't be necessary. Your solution will probably turn slightly orange-yellow; that is a normal reaction of goat milk and lye.
- Once your solution is thoroughly mixed, allow it to rest while you get together your other ingredients. We want the heating and cooling process to complete before adding the lye solution into the oils.
- Mix together your almond, coconut, and olive oil in a large bowl.
- Prepare your molds by oiling them. You don't need to use professional soap molds. My favorite mold is a silicone loaf pan, but I have also successfully used plastic food containers.
- Add the sugar and salt to the lye solution.
- Add the lye solution to the oil mixture, and gently mix them together.
- Once you have the lye solution incorporated into the oils, you can begin to carefully mix them together with a hand blender. While you can do this part by hand, it would take much longer. We are looking to have the mixture thicken up like mayonnaise. If your lye mixture is cold when you begin mixing them, it will take a little longer to get the mixture to thicken. That will give you a little extra working time, too, if you are new to soap making.
- Partway through the mixing process, begin to mix in the pumpkin pureé.
- Now is the time to add in the essential oils or you can use fragrance oils, if you prefer. Certain essential oils, like clove oil, will cause your soap to thicken much more quickly, so be prepared, just in case. The amount of oil you add will depend a lot upon the oils you use, and your personal taste for how fragrant you want your soap to be. I added in somewhere between 5-10ml of oils overall, using mostly clove essential oil, a little less cinnamon, and a little less ginger, because that is my order of preference for those oils. You can experiment here, and use your nose to help guide you. 😉 If you are using a pumpkin spice blend, it may have vanilla, which will darken your soap, so you may choose to add it to only the half of your soap with the spice mixture.
- Once you start to get to a mayonnaise like texture, separate out ⅓ to ½ of your mixture. You will be adding your spices to part of your soap, creating a swirled soap with two different colors. Add in your spices to the ⅓ to ½ that you separated out.
- Begin to pour about half of the un-spiced soap into your molds.
- Add a layer of the spiced soap, followed by the rest of the un-spiced, and finishing up with the rest of the spiced soap.
- Using a spoon or some other utensil, poke into the soaps, reaching for the bottom layer and pulling the soap out over top, trying to gently swirl the soaps in certain places. You can also zigzag your way through the soap in places, to have the soaps gently swirl together, without mixing them into each other.
- Once you are happy with your swirling, allow the soap to rest for at least 24 hours. Your soap will heat up during this time. After 24 hours, you can begin to check on your soap to see if it can be gently unmolded. If it is too soft, wait another day or two and check on it again. Gently unfold it as soon as you can, and cut your bars into your desired shapes.
- Let your soap continue to set, dry out, and harden for about a month. To help the process, turn your soap every couple of days.
- Enjoy using it! It smells wonderful!!
Don’t want to use goat milk? Just switch it for another 100ml of water.
I love this soap, and think it would make a great present for someone this fall, especially given in a beautiful soap saver exfoliating bag. You could buy one, or maybe we’ll just have to make one someday soon. 😉
Too many ideas, too little time…
How to Make Carob Flour
How many bars does this recipe yield? I would like to make approximately 25. Thanks so much for sharing your recipe! I am really excited about trying it!
Hello!
It really depends on the molds you use and how big you want each bar to be.
I usually use a standard silicone loaf pan when making this recipe. My pan is around 9 inches (23 cm) long, so if I were to make each bar with a width of 3/4 of an inch (just under 2cm), I’d get around 12 bars of soap. If I wanted thicker bars, I’d get less. Keep in mind that they may slightly shrink down as they dry and cure.
I’d aim for somewhere between 2-3 batches for 25 bars.
This looks like a great recipe. Where did you get your stamp to label your soap?
Camellia-
Hi Camelia,
This is actually a stamp for fondant normally, but it works well in the first days after unmolding the soap. The letters are a bit small, though, so you have to be careful while stamping or you take out too much soap when you remove it.
Mine looks like this fondant stamp. It’s not perfect, but it works.
I like the look of this stamp better (it’s a bit of a pain to slide the letters into the other one), but it’s also more expensive, so I’m not sure if it’s worth the difference in price. It also may not be long enough for some projects.
What about using 200 ml goat milk instead of water? Would that work?
Hi Annelie,
You could try it. I normally like to use some water with it so that I can mix the lye with the water and have the milk in its frozen state. I want to avoid burning the milk. If you use frozen milk or at least milk in a slushy state, you probably would be fine. At the worst, it may brown slightly.
Hi Tracy,
I am so happy I found your video and recipe. It is just what I was looking for.I will be making my first soap and I have been looking for an easy recipe also I am trying right now so I don’t wish to use expensive oils. Do you have any specific recipe where I can use reasonable oils ( canola, rice bran oils,palm oil etc). I don’t have butter with me, can’t get Shea butter etc as well.
Where I stay coconut oil and olive oil is very expensive so I was just thinking about few other options.Pls do share your recipe ( gm measurement) only. You may email me recipes if you feel like it. I’ll be very thankful to you dear Tracy.
priyankachaubey0185@gmail.com
Thank you
Priyanka
Hi Priyanka,
Most vegetable oils don’t make a very good bar of soap. They will make softer bars of soap that may get brown spots quickly and that don’t cleanse very well. Coconut oil and olive oil are the exceptions, and either can make a decent soap even without the use of any other oils.
You can use other vegetable oils as part of a recipe, but in lesser amounts and in conjunctions with some other fat that will make a harder, more cleansing bar of soap.
Are you opposed to using animal fats? The only alternative I can think of, if you don’t want to use coconut or olive oil, is to use either lard or tallow. Those fats could be combined with other oils to make a decent bar of soap. Palm oil should work decently too, but I’ve never personally used it.
I should elaborate that not only do different oils make different type soaps, but that each will need a different amount of lye. So, you can’t just switch out the fats in a recipe, you’d need to run the numbers in a lye calculator.
I’ve made this soap a couple of times but I find it seems to dissolve quite quickly. After one use in the water it had a lot of little pin holes through the whole bar. I’ve let it harden for 6 weeks before using it. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Ida-
Hmmm, that’s interesting, and something I’ve never heard before. I had bars of that soap last for forever, and that never happened to me.
Do your bars feel hard before using them?
This soap does use a lot of olive oil, and olive oil based soaps really do benefit from a long curing time. Some people wait for a year before they use soaps like a pure Castile soap or an Aleppo soap.
So, I was going to suggest letting it cure longer- but I feel like there must be something wrong with the bar itself if you are getting actual holes in it! That shouldn’t happen even with freshly made soap!
Is there a way you can send me a picture by email to tracy@thethingswellmake.com so I can see it and maybe we can try to troubleshoot the problem better?
Sounds like air bubbles have gotten mixed into your soap – make sure when mixing you’re not incorporating air into the soap & when pouring into molds use rubbing alcohol & spray it over soap – hopefully this helps
Thanks, Kim! 🙂
This is so beautiful! I want to make it for Christmas gifts, but I don’t have a lot of time for curing before Christmas, so I wanted to use a ready made goat’s milk soap base. Is this possible, and, if so, how much soap base would I use with the remainder of the ingredients?
Hi Inger,
I’m sure you’d be able to do it by using, by weight, the amount of soap that corresponds to the oils+lye+water+milk in the recipe. That said, if you were to make them this week, you’d still be able to give away a nice homemade gift.
The month waiting period is a guideline. The soap in a month has time to harden so that it won’t be so soft that it gets used up quickly. It also gives it time to continue some slower chemical reactions in the soap so that the soap improves.
All of that said, in a couple of weeks, the saponification process will have completed, and you’ll definitely have a useable and pretty soap. I’d just let everybody know that the soap is recently made and will improve with time. 😉
Hello, I am new to soap making and would like to try making this for holiday gifts, but I’m confused about the instruction to freeze the goat’s milk. Do you measure the amount needed, then freeze it solid? Then do you thaw it again before combining the goat’s milk and lye? I am using fresh, not powdered, goat’s milk. Thanks so much!
Hi Sara,
I used fresh milk too!
Yes, you measure out the milk and then freeze it. You keep it frozen when you mix with the lye (so, no, don’t thaw it!) to keep the milk from burning. You’ll find that lye has a strong reaction even when mixed with water. It heats up a lot.
When mixing with something with sugar in it, like milk, though, it can heat up too much and can ruin the milk. That’s why you freeze it.
I’m planning on making a goats milk recipe soon, and will make a video of the process so that people will have a better idea of what to look for. Meanwhile, though, I’ll try to be around to answer any questions you may have on the way!
Hello Tracy,
I neglected to leave a comment when I made your “Easy Pumpkin Spice Soap” recipe back on January 8th, 2016. In the past 2.5 years I have made approximately 35 different batches of soaps, all different recipes. I have 2 favourites, one of them being your Pumpkin Spice. It is a beautiful soap. It hardened very hard and the smell was wonderful and is so very very pretty. I pureed carrots, didn’t have pumpkin in the house at that time. Tomorrow I am making this beautiful soap again, using pumpkin this time, tis the season. So I am stopping by to say thank you for sharing your recipe Tracy and to tell you how much I enjoy your website.
Have a great week Tracy.
Darlene
Nova Scotia
Hi Darlene,
Awww- Thanks so much for your comment! I really appreciate it when I find out somebody has made and loved one of my recipes!
Yes, this was also one of my favorite soaps, despite it’s overall simplicity when it comes to the oils in the recipe. I purposely left it that way to help introduce the more complex idea of working with goats milk without changing up too many things from the beginner soap recipe. I guess I wanted people to gain confidence in being able to add in new ingredients so that they can make the soap that they want.
I hope it goes well for you! Next time I make it, I may add a touch of achiote powder to add a natural orange coloring.
May you have a wonderful week too!
Regarding this pumpkin recipe with goats milk, did you insulate durning the first 24 hours or are you leaving it uncovered?
Thank you!
Hi Violet,
I think I did at the time because back then I used to insulate all of them, just in case. Now I rarely do so anymore, unless it’s a soap in which I want ti to specifically be a bright color or something. There are soaps that benefit from going through a “gel” stage which is accomplished by keeping them hot through insulation in the first hours of curing. I don’t really think it would matter much either way for a soap like this one.
might be a dumb question but i was wondering if the utensils you’re using are only for soap making, or do you also use them in the kitchen once you’re done?
Hi Dani,
No, it’s not a dumb question at all!
Some people are very picky about only using their utensils for soap making.
I personally don’t think that it’s necessary and I use mine in the kitchen later on. In the end, you are making soap, so if you don’t mind using utensils that have come in contact with soap, you should be fine using them. 😉
Obviously, people who use separate utensils are worried about having unreacted lye on their utensils, but if you’ve made the soap right, the lye will have all reacted after a few days and will become soap. Even if you haven’t made the soap right, and you have lye on your utensils, you can clean them off with water and then afterwards with vinegar to react with any leftover lye if that makes you feel safer.
Lye is actually used in food production. It is used to cure olives, and make crusty pretzels. It isn’t that it is really poisonous, but is very corrosive because of how alkaline it is. You don’t want to touch or eat it directly.
I throw everything through the dishwasher before using it again, and I’m OK with that.
Everybody needs to do what they feel is best for them, though, and I understand how some people feel more comfortable using separate utensils just to be on the safe side.