Minnie Mouse Cake for 2nd Birthday

Minnie Mouse cake for a 2 year old girl. Isn’t that so typical for a girl of that age?

Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse cakes are evergreen and so loved by children. This was my first Minnie cake and I was as excited to make it as the birthday girl was to have it for her birthday. The thing about this cake is that it was not baked in a specialty mold or cake tin. In fact, it was cut out of a rectangle cake. And Minnie’s pose on the cake, it was directly from an image provided by the birthday girl and her mummy. 

Cute and pretty Minnie Mouse cake for my niece

I decorated this cake using an image transferring technique I have used very commonly for many of my cakes. And it works very well for me especially when I have to decorate sheet cakes in customized shapes and images.

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How to Make a Minnie Mouse Cake

These were the main supplies I used to decorate this cake:

• Cake – at the time I made this cake, I didn’t have that many cake tins, so the largest I had was a 6 inches by 10 inches rectangle cake tin. And since the cake requested was larger than the cake tin size, I had to bake 2 cakes and stick them together to get a large enough cake. I used our family favorite cake, my butter pound cake recipe.
• Buttercream – I used buttercream as a filling as well as to crumb coat the cake. I also used buttercream to pipe Minnie on the cake. For the crumb coat, I did not tint the icing, but for Minnie, I tinted the icing in pink, ivory, black, and white.
• Butter icing – I used butter icing to cover the sides of the cake as well as the rest of the cake area which was not covered by Minnie Mouse’s image.
• Fondant – I used store-bought fondant and tinted it in pink. The fondant was used for the cake border as well as the wordings on the cake.
• Piping tips and bags – I used Wilton tip 3 for the outlines and star tip number 16 for the stars.  And I used Disposable piping bags. I always prefer using these when working with buttercream it is a daunting tasking having to wash off all the grease of the piping bags. Disposing of them is a much-preferred option!

Mouse Mouse bow in pink in buttercream piping

And this was how I decorated the Minnie Mouse cake:

The Minnie Mouse template

• I started with the image. I printed it off the internet and resized it to the size I wanted on the cake. After that, I traced it onto a parchment paper and cut it out along its outline.
• Next was the cake. I did not have a large rectangle pan that could fit the size of Minnie’s image. Hence, I baked two rectangle cakes, filled and joined them with buttercream.

Carving the cake

• I then placed the Minnie Mouse template on the joint cakes and carved out Minnie’s image. In doing this, I left about an inch allowance from the outline of the image to the sides of the cake.  
• Once the carving was done, I removed all excess cake and lifted off the template. Next, was the crumb coat. I applied a thin layer of buttercream all over the cake and returned the template to the cake top again. Using my craft knife, I marked the outlines of Minnie’s image, including her eyes, bow, hands, and others onto the cake. When marking the inner outlines, I literally cut through the template to leave the markings on the cake, so it’s important that the knife used is sharp. The thin coating of buttercream helps to make the markings on the cake more obvious, so that makes it easier when it comes to the piping work later.
• And by the time I completed all the markings on the cake, the Minnie Mouse template was already in pieces. I removed all the pieces and covered the sides of the cake with butter icing. The icing was not tinted; hence the natural ivory tint of butter was obvious.

Piping the image

• Once the sides were done, I moved on to complete Minnie Mouse’s image on the cake. I started with black icing and icing tip #3 for the outlines. And then, using tip #16, I covered Minnie following its standard pink, white, ivory, and black colors. I used piping tip #16 for most parts of Minnie Mouse except for her eyes and nose which were piped using tip #3.

Minnie Mouse face on a buttercream cake

• Once Minnie Mouse was completed. I cut out the ‘Happy Birthday” wordings using alphabet cutters. And I rolled a long strip of fondant for the cake border.
• Finally, I piped random tiny pink flowers on the sides of the cake and on the cake board.
• And that was how I decorated this Minnie Mouse cake.

Minnie Mouse sheet cake in buttercream for a 2nd birthday

Hope you enjoyed this technique. Happy cake decorating 🙂