Despicable Me Minion Cupcakes

So, with the return of Despicable Me for its second instalment, minions have been all over the online baking world. Not only are their cute little cartoonish faces a perfect template for sugar and fondant work that would appeal to children (and adults!), but in the film, Gru goes under cover as a spy, under the ruse of opening a cupcake shop, humorously named "Bake My Day". One of the minions does actually make a minion cupcake, but it appears for only a split second before being crushed by Lucy, for reasons which you will have to watch the film to find out! I don't normally like to advertise too much on my posts, I mainly like to just try new recipes to learn new skills. But I really did enjoy the Despicable Me films, they are one of the few films that really do live up to the "appealing to both adults and children" tag - this second instalment of the series is really sweet, as we follow Gru on his challenges as a new single father, and trying to juggle that with looking for love and being roped in to help save the planet from an enjoyably silly and farcical baddie.

There have been a great many recipes in response, from the basic twinkie minion cupcakes to the amazingly detailed and impressive full 3D minion cake by Ann Reardon on "How to Cook That" (I seem to have become her biggest fan recently! But this is simply one of the best I've seen so far).

But what spurred me on to make my own addition to the recipes already available online was the massive gap between the two recipes. Not everyone would have the time or the number of mouths to feed as Ann, yet I couldn't help feeling disappointed at those simplistic cupcakes, which were essentially just squirted buttercream with bare twinkies. And it seemed to me that with very little extra work, something that looks much more authentic could be produced. So I set about making what I thought would be an improved version of those cupcakes.

Living in the UK, of course we don't have any twinkies available, so I used the equivalent of what we have here - mini rolls - which come in a great range of flavours from strawberry to toffee to mint, as well as the regular chocolate flavour.

To get the smooth look for the minions, I took the basic dipping idea from the fabulous people behind the Hello Cupcake trilogy, Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. They now even have a free app available for download, with some great tutorials and videos on that help explain the dipping technique. I would recommend all budding bakers and cupcake fanatics to download it now! They suggest to leave the cupcakes in the freezer for the in between stages, but since I don't have a lot of space in my freezer, and had long gaps in between the stages due to a lot of work on, I just left them in my fridge, and they set fine and were sturdy during the later steps.

Recipe:

Cupcakes and body
Use your favourite cupcake recipe for 12 cupcakes. I used lemon flavour as it is a firm favourite at my house
A pack of 6 mini rolls in your favourite flavour, cut in half

For the blue cupcake topping and minion dungarees:
150 g white chocolate
75 g buttercream
Blue food colouring to a "denim" shade

Yellow buttercream for the minions' skin:
Canned or pre-made vanilla buttercream with lemon curd or sauce to your taste (can be omitted if you don't like lemon, I just used it for extra flavour) with yellow gel food paste colouring
(I am normally an advocate of home made buttercream and steer well clear of any palm oil stuff, but the people behind "Hello Cupcake" insist that homemade just doesn't withstand the heating required for the dipping. I can imagine home made buttercream separating when heated too much, so I just decided to make an exception for this recipe. I used the Betty Crocker Vanilla Buttercream style icing. I know its terrible, but it tastes amazing)
You will need enough to fill a mug or other receptacle to dip the minions' bodies in, plus extra for the arms, so roughly 1 - 2 cups

Additional details:
Small cups of buttercream coloured black
Small amount of regular icing or fondant (I just made up my own using a few tablespoons of powdered icing sugar and mixing with a few drops of water to get to the right consistency)
Silver edible food paint (I used the alcohol-based Sugarflair one)

1. Make your regular muffin or cupcake recipe. Your muffins can be flat or a little bit domed as mine are here, but try to avoid overhangs. Before proceeding to the next step, place your mini rolls in the fridge to firm up
2. I used a white-chocolate/buttercream mix for the initial covering of my cupcakes, because I wanted it to set quite sturdy as it needed to hold the mini rolls on after the resting time in the fridge. Buttercream alone would probably work if you have space in your freezer! (See the recommendations on the Hello Cupcake app). If using the white chocolate, melt the mix gently in the microwave in short bursts of 10 - 20 seconds, stirring really well between each burst, until all the lumps have melted, and then leave to cool for 10 - 15 minutes or until it has reached room temperature. Then either dip or cover your cupcakes with a knife. Move on to the next step before the buttercream sets, but keep the remainder at room temperature to do the overalls later.
3. Carefully slice the mini rolls in half with a serrated knife - try to avoid crushing the rolls, as they are so soft! Then, place the mini rolls cut side down onto the top of the cupcake, and then leave it in the fridge or freezer until set.
4. Once the mini rolls are firm, shave off a little of the top edge to try and create a more rounded shape. Some of them became a bit crumbly by this point, but it's okay if you're going to dip them in frosting anyway!

Now for the fun dipping part! As Karen and Alan suggest in their book and app, heat up the frosting with 10 second blasts with thorough stirring in between until the frosting is nice and fluid (check out their app for a video of the consistency required if you're not sure). I also added some lemon sauce into the mix to give it a burst of flavour and help to make it more fluid. I love the M & S lemon sauce, it's so delicious! I end up incorporating it into all sorts of recipes.
Once it is ready, you can start dipping. I found it a bit fiddly to dip all the way to the edge, so I did most of them by spooning the melted buttercream over the mini rolls.

Once they're all ready, they should look nice and smooth and shiny, like this:

Leave them in the fridge or freezer again to set
5. Use the remaining "denim" buttercream/chocolate mix in a piping bag to pipe on the front and back of the dungarees and the shoulder straps. The remainder of the dipping sauce can also be scooped into a piping bag to pipe on the minion arms. I didn't try to do anything with fondant/icing, because I thought the pieces would just be too small and fiddly, but it could be possible in the right hands!

6. While the dungarees and arms are setting in the fridge, make the eyes out of fondant. I simply made up a small amount of icing (fondant) fresh from icing sugar and water (I don't like to store icing, because it almost always dries up and is impossible to use again. So I tend to just make up how much I need). I rolled the icing into a thin cylinder, and then cut 5 mm slices, and shaped those into flat circular goggle shapes. Then, I used a dotting tool dipped in black food colouring paste to dot the pupils in the middle, before painting the sides with edible silver paint. It's best to get them ready and dry before putting them onto the minions, as you can see, they are very small and the paint can go everywhere!

7. Lastly, colour a few tablespoons of buttercream black. I also used Karen and Alan's suggestion to add some cocoa powder, to make it much darker, there by reducing the amount of black food colouring required to turn it properly black. I piped a line all the way around the head, and then pressed the eyes into it at the front. With the remaining black buttercream, you can add details like hair and the Gru symbol on the front of their dungarees.

This worked out really great, and didn't require all that much extra work. I'm sure that with more time, it would be possible to produce something even better. It would be easy to change the dipping frosting colour to purple to make the mutant minions. Please comment below if you have any questions or suggestions, or if you have attempted these. I'd love to see some photos of your creations!

This may probably be one of my last posts for a while, since things are getting busy in the lab as I come to the last few weeks of experiments for my PhD, so I will have to cut back on elaborate projects like this (although with all the resting time in the fridge, I managed to go to the lab and get work done and by the time I came back, the different stages were all nice and set!). 

There may be one more post before I go to China in September for three months, we'll see how things go!

But in the meantime, let me know how your Despicable Me bakes go or if you have any questions, just comment below!
Bye!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update! I've since made these minion cupcakes again for a big minion fan's birthday! 

Scientist Minion!

I made him using white modelling chocolate, whitened using some icing whitener powder. I was a bit suspicious about how well whiteners could work, but it really did the trick! Although it does make you look like you've been eating tippex if you get any on your face!

I used half a cocktail stick to support each arm, and then fashioned a little pippette, a journal article and a hand using some more modelling chocolate (white and milk)

Science minion getting ready to go with pals to the party