Despicable Me Minion Cupcakes & #FunFoodFriday

Welcome to Fun Food Friday! Have you been making any fun food recently?  Whether it be lovely lunches, creative cakes, or a recipe you’ve blogged, please link up below and share the inspiration around.  Anything goes, as long as it’s edible!

Today I’m sharing something a little different for my fun food – it’s certainly not healthy but it’s definitely fun and delicious – my first attempt at minion cupcakes! As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this week, Small Child turned 6 recently.  One of the things I will never forget from my own childhood was the awesome birthday cakes that my Mum made us every year for our birthdays.  I used to love poring over her cake decorating cook books, choosing which cake I wanted for my next birthday, however far away it might be!  We were given free reign to choose whatever cake we liked, and she always rose to the challenge with an absolutely brilliant cake, every year without fail.  Whilst I don’t have her amazing cake decorating skills, I am determined to do my best to carry on the tradition with my own children, and I hope that what I lack in skills I make up for in enthusiasm!

Having said that, I’m very proud of this year’s efforts – definitely my best cakes yet! Since I made minion sandwiches for Small Child and a friend of his, Small Child was desperate to see what all the fuss was about, so we finally watched Despicable Me (and a week or so later Despicable Me 2), and Small Child’s obsession with minions began.  He originally asked for a cat cake, “one that looks like a real cat please Mummy”, so you can imagine how relieved I was when he changed his mind and asked for an army of minions instead! Minions I can do, realistic looking cats, not so much!

I made the cupcakes from scratch using a basic sponge recipe, but replacing the standard sugar with soft brown sugar, if only because that’s all I had in the cupboard!  I cheated with the fondant icing and brought it ready made – 1 small block of yellow icing and one of white was more than enough to decorate around two dozen minion cupcakes.  These were so easy to make – the most time consuming bit was the eyes, which I made first, before icing and putting the minion cakes together.

To make them, I rolled out some of the white icing and used two sizes of circle shaped mini bento cutters to make rings.  I laid them all out on greaseproof paper, then sprayed them with edible silver icing spray.  Unfortunately the colour didn’t come out at all as I was expecting – they were sparkly but still pretty much white, even after several coats of spray, so I decided to colour some of the icing grey (I used black gel colouring for this) then start the process all over again, cutting rings from the icing as I had before.  I sprayed the grey version just once, and they came out perfectly this time, sparkly and definitely silver! While the silver rings were drying, I used the larger of the two circle cutters to cut the same number of circles from some more of the white icing, and laid them out on greaseproof paper to dry out a little.  Once the silver rings had dried, I brushed each white circle with a little water, then carefully lifted the silver rings and placed them over the white circles to make the eyes.  Some of them looked more than a bit wonky, but I could live with that at 11pm!

Whilst the ‘eyes’ were drying, I got on with covering the cupcakes with the yellow fondant.  I had to turn to Twitter at this point, because I wasn’t sure of the best way to ‘glue’ the fondant icing to the cakes.  Most people recommended butter cream, so I made up a small batch and spread it over the top of each cupcake, before topping with a circle of yellow fondant, which I had cut out with a circle cutter that matched the size of the cakes.  This worked brilliantly – the buttercream helped smooth out all the lumps and bumps in the cakes leaving a fairly smooth surface on top.

I then coloured the rest of the white fondant black, again using gel food colouring, rolled it out and cut strips from it which I attached to each cupcake with a brush of water.  I topped each cupcake with either one or two eyes, then finished the eyes off with tiny black circles cut from the spare black icing with another mini bento cutter.

I finished off the minion faces with an edible marker pen.   I had great fun drawing on all the features and trying to make each minion unique!

Small Child was absolutely over the moon with his minion cupcakes – it would seem that they were the icing on the cake of “the best birthday EVER!”

Now it’s your turn, what fun food have you been making recently? Please link up your foodie posts below and share the inspiration around. Do feel free to link up Instagram, Facebook or Twitter pictures if you don’t have a blog of your own. Anything goes, as long as it’s edible!

A few quick reminders before you link up; please visit some of the other blogs that have linked up and leave them a comment – we all love comments! If you are linking up from your blog, please grab the button below too, and put it either in your blog post or somewhere on your blog. Both old and new posts are very welcome, and do feel free to link up several posts if you’d like.

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Thank you in advance for linking up, I hope you find some fun inspiration!