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. As soon as I saw your Minion cake I had to give it a go. I made my son 9 mini minions for his 18th

    • Hi Joyce, Your minions are amazing! Awesome job!

  2. 2nd pic

    • Hi Nikki, Your Minion looks amazing. Well done!

  3. Hi Ann, I made this cake for my son’s first birthday. It was a huge hit with the adults haha

  4. Hello, I was wondering how many servings this cake was for? Thanks!

    • Hi Claire, This cake will make about 40 serves depending on how you choose to cut it.

  5. Hello Ann!
    Thanks a lot for your great Tutorial.
    I made this for my sons Birthday last Sunday.
    Best wishes from Germany!
    Martina =o)

    • Awesome work Martina.

  6. Hi ! THIS IS MY MINION CAKE DONE LAST WEEK. 🙂

    • Hi Ioana, This is brilliant! You have done such a good job. Well done.

  7. Made this for my birthday hope you like it

  8. trying to upload once more JPEG

    • great job Tracey!

  9. Hi Ann i made this one back in October i love your tutorials and I’m keen to try the Louis Vuitton one next. Minion traveled over an hour in the car standing up so he did well!

    • Oops he didn’t upload try again JPEG

    • Jpeg

    • he did great! Well done 🙂

  10. thank you so much for the tutorial! loved it!

    • WOW!!!! well done

  11. Hi Ann,
    I was wondering how do you cut this cake with so many sticks in it? I wanted to make a similar cake but I’m not sure about cutting a slice… Any tips? Thanks

  12. hi, I was inspird by your great recipe, due to time I had to do a bit different minion. Check out my today’s product for my daughter’s 8 years birthday…. Nkt saying perfect, just wanted to share, thanks for the inspiration!

  13. mon neveu maxence est fan de ce dessin animé, je vais essayé de faire ce magnifique gateau pour son anniversaire; ce ne sera certainement pas aussi classe mais je vais m’appliquer; je lui avait fait au mois d’août la voiture cars que j’avais acheté sur votre site et je m’étais assez bien débrouillé, c’est que que la famille a dit !!!……..et Maxence ne voulait pas que l’on coupe la voiture à l’heure du dessert. sa surprise fut totale à très bientôt je ne m’en lasse pas

  14. Hi
    I just love your tutorials but I’m curious how you can do licenced characters?
    The cake shop where I worked was not allowed to demonstrate on anything licenced… is because you a re not charging for the tutorial??
    I love what you do anyway!

  15. This is my minion i did nearly a year ago 🙂 thanks ann, your so very talented

  16. hi I made this, though I had this differently, since I was in a hurry and I didnt have tylose powder… thank you for all your awesome tutorials, you’re the best for me. God bless!

  17. Sorry, my photo upload didn’t work. Hope this one does 🙂

  18. My second attempt at your gorgeous Minion cake. I actually got this one to stand up. I am so very happy with him and I can’t wait for the birthday girl to see him. Thanks Ann 🙂

  19. Hi, how would you do his mouth, if you wanted his mouth to be open and have teeth?

  20. HI! me and my sister love your youtube channel! i was just wondering, i saw in another episode you had a set of circle cutters in all different sizes. do you remember where you got those?

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