A Despicable Cake

For our daughters Birthday we decided to make a Minion cake. It was hard to chose as there is so many things that she likes at the moment. The minion won over as it is colourful, fun and recognisable. I cannot take all of the credit for this as it was a joint effort between myself and my husband. We used a 18cm by 25cm cake tin. My husband drew a template to match the dimensions and cut out the features from greeceproof paper. I made two cakes using a very basic sponge recipe, 4oz self raising flour, 4oz stork and 4oz caster sugar and 2 eggs in each cake. I used the usual method of creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs gradually and then folding in flour.

I made the coloured icing using ready made royal icing kneaded with a paste made from icing sugar and food colouring. It is time consuming and I dyed my hands blue but it allowed me to get the colour I wanted without having to buy a huge quantity or a mixed pack. When the cakes were out and cool we sandwiched them with jam and covered in a thin marzipan layer. I then rolled all of the icing out and cut out the pieces using the templates. My husband then positioned all of the pieces on the cake, sticking them with water and adding finishing touches including the arms and legs. The mouth took a while to get right but the beauty of using a minion is that we could take advantage of there being so many that all look a little different that we were bound to match one. Our daughter loved it and instantly recognised it, we also got some compliments from some hard to impress friends and family. It tasted quite good too.