Ann Reardon

Despicable Me 2 3D Minion Cake Decorating Tutorial

IMG_2646Despicable Me 2 is coming soon and my middle boy loves the cute minions, so this year he wanted a minion birthday cake. There have also been some requests from subscribers for a 3D upright cake tutorial and despicable me cake, so I filmed the making of his cake for you.

You will need:
round cake boards x 2 (one 8cm (3.15 inches) and one 15cm (5.91 inches) in diameter)
2 x 32cm (12.6 inches) cake spikes and four shorter cake spikes
base wooden or mdf cake board
Four lots of the Vanilla Cake Recipe 8 x 20cm (7.87 inches) tins, trimmed down to 16cm (6.3 inches) in diameter.
2 quantities of Buttercream Recipe in flavour of your choice
Fondant: 800g (28.22 ounces) yellow, 20g (0.71 ounces) brown, 50g (1.76 ounces) white fondant and 300g (10.58 ounces) blue (fondant recipe here, how to colour fondant here)
100g (3.53 ounces) Black fondant
Silver luster dust
Lollies and candles to go around the cake (optional)
This cake will make about 40 serves

Making a 3D Minion Cake
1. TEMPLATE: For any 3d cake that you want to make I recommend finding a picture of the character that you want to make, enlarge it to the size you want the finished cake to be and use that as your guide for sizing the cake and details. Here is the minion picture that I used, it is over two pages so you will need to cut and tape together Minion Template

2. DETAILS: Fondant details can be made up to a month in advance and left to dry out. Use the printout that you made of your character to guide you in the size. If you have never worked with fondant before watch the fondant basics video for help on colouring fondant.
To make the details for this minion cake see the video for instructions.

3. FRAME: You need a frame to support your cake.
Place your round cake boards onto the base board and drill two holes through both pieces of cardboard and through the base. Position the holes where you want the minions legs to be.
Drill two more holes one in front and the other behind the ones you’ve just done and add a short stick to each so that it sticks up above the board by 3cm (1.18 inches).
If your drill holes are not super tight then you can glue those in place. Put your smaller base board on top.

4. CAKES: Bake your cakes. For this cake I used 20cm (7.87 inches) round cake tins and trimmed them down to 16cm (6.3 inches). It took 8 cakes. 3D cakes take a deceptively large amount of cake.

5. FROSTING: You need frosting so the fondant has something to stick to. You can use ganache, I used buttercream.

6. ASSEMBLY: put your supports into place and your base cake board, cover it in a thin layer of buttercream and add your first layer of cake, add more buttercream and then your next layer of cake.
Insert a cake spike down to the cake board and mark off the level, cut two sticks to this same height so the cake is level. Poke them into the cake, add your next cake board and more buttercream. Add the next layer of cake, more buttercream REPEAT that until the cake is the height of your print out. (See the video for a demonstration).

7. CARVING: Use a finely serrated knife to cut away pieces of cake to make it the right shape. The top and the base of the minion is domed so it is fairly simple shape to carve.

8. CRUMB COAT: Cover the whole cake in a thin layer of buttercream, it doesn’t have to look pretty this is just to catch all the crumbs. Place it in the fridge and let it firm up.

9. FROSTING: Add another layer of buttercream over the top and use your pallette knife to smooth it off as best as you can. Then leave it for about 15 minutes and use some paper towel to smooth out any imperfections. Put back in the fridge.

10. DECORATE: See the video above for detailed instructions.

minion cake despicable me 2 minion cake despicable me cake

by Ann Reardon How To Cook That

My Cookbook

ann reardon crazy sweet creations cookbook
Stores that sell my book listed by country: http://bit.ly/ARcookbook
All recipe quantities in the book are in grams, ounces and cups.

265 Comments View Comments

  1. […] a great tutorial and video on howtocookthat.net and you should watch it a few times if you want to make a standing minion cake.  But there are […]

  2. Hi your link to the minion cake video is broken. Can you please fix 🙂

    • g’day Anthea, I just clicked on the page to check and it seems to be working correctly

  3. Hi, is marshmallow fondant good for this cake? If yes, will it be shiny like this one?

    • Hi Hayk, you could use marshmallow fondant, but home made fondant is not as flexible or easy to work with. On this cake it would definitely be worth purchasing a good fondant, as the decorating is really the hardest part.

  4. I love, love , love you work. You a cake artist and tou make it look so easy. I appreciate your gift of you time and knowledge and sharing it with us all. Thank you.

    On another note can you tell me how many cakes to bake and the dimensions for 20 ppl feeding and a 10ppl feeding? What would you charge for this art work of amazingness? Thank you in advance.

    • Hi Bee, Unfortunately we can’t make cakes to order.

  5. Wow! I can honestly say that this time I set the goal way to high!
    Ann makes it all look soooo easy but it took me to my limits of baking and of course not without its problems.
    This minion was way too big and way too heavy and is slowly squashing itself under its own weight.
    Thankyou Ann for this wonderful baking site.
    Keep up the good work.
    David

    • Great work David. Well done! Did you use structural supports to manage the cake weight? That is what Ann did to prevent the cake collapsing on itself.

      • Hello,
        Yes I did use supports but I made the whole thing just too big but that diddn’t matter cuase Everyone was impressed especially Miy son who’s 9th birthday was being celebrated.
        Once again thankyou for sharing this with us Ann
        Greetings from Holland
        David

  6. Cool

  7. Ann, I have found great joy in watching hours of your videos. I really enjoy cakes and decorating them and do some pretty elaborate ones for my kids’ birthdays. I wanted to make a PURPLE minion cake coming up this month and am going to adapt your instructions here, but I was wondering if you had good ideas about what to do with making all the wispy purple hair. The yellow one just has a few strands, but the purple ones looks like cotton candy on their head. Given that I will not be able to spin my own purple cotton candy, what do you suggest to make the hair?

    • Hi Missy Westergard, Ann thinks Pashmak would work well. This is Iranian or persian fairy floss (cotton candy) and you can usually buy it in a variety of colours and it is more silky like hair. We can buy it hear online and in bakeries that specialize in persian style foods. You could also just buy purple cotton candy on line if you prefer.

  8. i made this cake back in 2013 and after reading through the comments i just realized that i never posted a picture! anyways here it is almost 3 years later lol

    • Your minion looks great Claire! Thanks for posting.

  9. Thank you for the instructions. I did my best an I hope that my little man will survive the transport. 😉

    • Hi Fatima, He looks awesome. You have done a great job!

  10. Sisters birthday cake, couldn’t make it stand up. And I’m having no luck with using luster dust. And a J for Jess instead of a G
    Tasted good though.

    • Thank you for the instructions, I would not have figured out how to make this on my own 🙂

    • Hi Hay, It loos great. Lustre dust is usually available online. If you can’t get it locally try talking to a cake decorating store and ask for a recommendation.

  11. This is the whole crew. I used straight side cup cake tins to make little ones

    • Those look awesome, a minion army

    • that’s genius ! an you describe in detail how you made it ?

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