Despicable Me Minion Cake!

No flash

Last month I went to see Despicable Me 2 with some of my siblings and it was then I decided I’d make a Minion cake for my brother’s birthday. Which is today, and I just couldn’t wait to blog about it! I used this Betty Crocker tutorial as a baseline for cake.

This cake broke my heart to make! It’s been ages since I’ve baked in my parents house and I’ve gotten so used to my own equipment. Nothing went right. No batteries left in scales, so I had to use some non digital ones that are very dodgy. Then the electric beaters just didn’t seem to have it in them to cream the butter and sugar. The cake baked fine, until I tried to lift it out of the pan and it cracked down the centre. ‘Not a problem, it’ll be fine once iced’. I left it to cool, when I came back, some of it had stuck to the plate (rookies mistake I know! But there’s no wire cooling wrack). Though because it was going to be on the bottom, it didn’t make much difference. The cake was fine to shape and the 2 layers of yellow icing went on fine. Blue icing was a bit of a pain to get right, bits of yellow kept peaking through. Black icing for piping was a disaster, it just wasn’t intense enough and of course there were no sandwich bags for making a piping bag, so I fashioned one out of grease proof paper (Mary Berry is probably not impressed me with, it was dreadful). Luckily it all came together in the end (despite it cracking again! Just smoothed it out with some more icing!) and it was really worth it as my brother loved it.

To make it, I made a few adjustments to the Betty Crocker recipe above. I made the cake and icing from scratch, using my ‘go to’ Madeira cake and buttercream icing recipes (I doubled the amounts for both). I followed the icing guides in the article.

For the eye, I twisted off one side of an Oreo and then built up 2 other insides of Oreos to make the white thicker (not really necessary I don’t). I used a Cadbury Button for centre of the eye (and trouser buttons) and for the ring around it, I just scrunched up tin foil.

For the black straps, I used the ready to roll icing, coloured it black, left it hardened in the fridge, then rolled out and cut. Lastly I ‘piped’ (if you can say I even did that!) the black edging along the blue and yellow icing, added some liquorice for the hair and for the mouth!

The great thing about this is you can definitely change it up, you could do two eyes, you can change to mouth to a big grin or even a different facial expression. I’d love to see if I could make a few mini ones from a large cake, another time maybe!

It’s not as polished as the Betty Crocker one, I definitely need to get a palette knife so I can make my finish more smooth. And it’s not perfect, the above story shows why! But I’m happy with it!

With flash