This is what my cupcakes originally looked like. They're made with melt and pour soap, piping the icing on when it gets cool enough to keep its shape.
Since that method is very time consuming I decided to look into easier methods. This one was great. Super easy to work with and I could get about 10 done in the time it took me to do 1 with the other method. The downside? The icing doesn't harden very well. It uses foaming bath whip as the frosting so it doesn't get as hard as melt and pour soap. I'm afraid these will get beat up during shipping but aren't they pretty?
The next method was using melt and pour soap combined with foaming bath whip. These dried much harder. It wasn't quite as easy to work with though. The consistency was like that of Silly String which made it a bit harder to pipe onto the soaps, but still a lot easier than my original method. (sorry for the bad picture)
Then I decided to try cold process soap cupcakes. These are made from scratch like my bar soaps. It took a few attempts to figure out how to do it properly. I learned that I can't use the oven method with my silicone molds or it gives them a very ugly texture. I also learned that I have to pour the bases at a very thin trace and then I need to have patience to allow the "icing" to set up a bit before piping onto the bases. This one turned out nice but I didn't wait quite long enough and couldn't get much height with the icing.
Here's another cold process soap cupcake. This time I walked away for 15 minutes and when I came back the soap was perfect to work with. I'm loving these but the bad thing is that I can't make one at a time like I could with the melt and pour soaps. These need to be done in batches so I can't customize them unless someone wants a whole batch.
I think I'm going to sell both the cold process soap cupcakes and the melt and pour/foaming bath whip cupcakes. That way I can make the cold process ones in batches but still have the others for the option of customizing.
There's one more method that I haven't tried. It involves using melt and pour soap along with liquid soap. I'll post an update if I decide to give that one a try.
