It was my brother's birthday this week and to celebrate our mum always makes us a novelty cake based on something we've been loving that year. My brother's been really into minions recently - we've got T shirts, saw the film together and everything, so I thought it would be a really cool idea to make him a minion cake. It was pretty intricate and at times really frustrating but I'm so happy with the way it turned out, so I thought it would be cool to share it with you guys in case any of you are interested in making a similar one! Here goes...
To make the cake itself, use your favourite recipe - chocolate, vanilla, whatever strikes your fancy - to make three separate cakes in small cake tins, as well as one in a hemisphere tin or rounded bowl. Stick the cakes together in a tower using buttercream.
To cover the minion, we used yellow buttercream (frosting). A lot of people who've made cakes like this before have used fondant icing instead which does look really good, but I prefer the taste of buttercream and find it much easier to work with. It can be really difficult to get fondant/moulding icing to look just as perfect as you want!
However, we did use moulding icing for details like the arms, legs, eye and dungarees. Since these are smaller parts it was easier to manipulate the icing to look exactly how we wanted. Make sure you colour or buy moulding icing in yellow, black and blue for the different sections.
With the icing, make one white circle, one slightly larger grey circle and one small black circle for the eye. Complete this with a thin black band to go round the back of the minion's head.
Next, for the overalls, make four squares of blue - two long thin rectangles for the sides and two smaller squares for the front. You'll also need two long thin strips of blue for the overall straps, and a tiny little blue square for the overall pocket. Complete the look with small black buttons and, if the cake is for a birthday, you can even make their birthday number to stick on the overall pocket.
Next, make two yellow arms with little black gloves and two blue legs with little black feet to add onto the minion. These should be fairly easy to shape freehand, just try your best to make them symmetrical! If you find it difficult to keep the arms up, you can put cocktail sticks inside them to keep them upright. We used a chocolate button for the brown section of the eye and added a tiny little black icing circle as the pupil. Stick them on with either drippy icing or jam!
For the spiky hair, we poked tiny holes into the top of the minion's head then rolled little black worms of icing to stick into the holes. As a final touch, I rolled three little bananas out of yellow icing to put around the edge - you could also stick candles into the bananas!
And there you have it! One beautiful birthday minion. Hope you liked this recipe, and do let me know if you decide to make your own minion!
