I Haz Gummy Minifig Army and So Can You!

You know you want some.

Someone was circulating an animated gif drawing of wobbly LEGO on G+ today. Jokes about GELO were made. Then some of my friends thought maybe I could make something like that.

Heck yes.

So fine, world, here are the seeeeeekrits on how to make your own wobbly LEGO. Step 1) Get a LEGO mold. Step 2) Make my Basic Gummy Recipe. Step 3) Make gummy bricks. Step 4) Eat.

Oh wait, my loyal readers (all six of them) are crying out, “We’ve seen Basic Gummy already! We want to know more details for an intermediate application! SHOW US THE MINIFIG INSTRUCTIONS!”

Well at least I imagine they’re crying that out. Something has to justify me writing a blog post before breakfast. At 1:15 PM. On a food blog. * shifty eyes *

Fine, you’ve got it. Here’s how to make the multicolour LEGO Minifigs.

First, you’re going to need the LEGO Minifigure Ice Tray. The link is to Amazon, but if you’ve got a LEGO store near you, you might be able to save a few bucks there. (Side note: this is an actual LEGO product. There is also a brick mold that is not LEGO brand and while it makes cute enough bricks, they’re not sized/proportioned correctly for real LEGO so keep that in mind when purchasing.)

Next, decide what colours you want to use for the bodies and legs. Presumably you’re going to use yellow for the head and hands, so make sure you have some lemon gelatin dessert mix, plus the other two colours.

Mix up the other two colours as shown in the Basic Gummy Recipe. You can get greater clarity by letting it warm and cool slowly a few times without much mixing so the bubbles can all escape, but keep in mind that children will not care about bubbles, so don’t bother if you’re just doing this for an audience that won’t notice.

Make a tray full of one colour minifigs (let’s say green). Let it set up, remove them, and set them aside. Repeat with the second colour (let’s say orange). Repeat for as many as you wish to make. You can make a great many figures with this amount of gummy. I don’t know how many, honestly, since I tend to make the figures with leftover gummy I’m using for other purposes.

Use a sharp knife to remove the heads and hands from the green and orange minifigs. You can even toss these back into their respective pots to be reused – this is one of the things I love about gummy! Psssst…you can also just eat ’em. And cackle. * more shifty eyes *

Then use the knife to cut between the torsos and pants. Note that this is optional: you could just have single-colour bodies and torsos if you were in a rush or didn’t want to make as many.

Then alternate pants and torsos back into the mold, pushing them down firmly to squeeze out any bubbles and make sure they’re lined up properly:

If you’re not sure where to cut, grab a real minifig and look at the parts.

Next, carefully flood the backs with yellow gummy, being sure to let it dribble into the head and hand areas and between the torso and legs. Luckily, gummy is so runny that it’ll usually work its way down well enough, much more easily than chocolate. Still, it doesn’t hurt to give the mold a gentle tap to knock up any bubbles.

It’s hard to see because of the blue mold and the darker body colours, but these have been flooded with yellow gummy along their backs and into the head and hand spaces. The warm yellow will fuse the solidified orange and green together, and will fuse itself on for the heads and hands.

If you end up using too much yellow, don’t worry about it: most of it will flow to the sides and you can trim it off later. Plus, as shown in the photo above, you can’t really see the yellow when it’s against the darker colours, so nobody will notice it on the backs of the minifigs.

Don’t you just love it when things work out that conveniently to hide seams and/or mistakes?

Let the minifigs completely solidify again – the fridge will make this faster – and then gently remove them. Sometimes you can even get them to balance upright:

Congratulations, you are now set to impress the heck out of everyone you know who loves LEGO. Plus, see those lines on the left side near the hand and on the shoulder? That’s yellow that got under the orange torso in the mold. Do you think that’s noticeable when not photographed with a macro lens and shown at high resolution? Nope. Again, the yellow hides against other colours. Awesome, eh?

Muahahaha. Minions. Tasty, tasty minions.

If you have a black edible ink marker, you can even draw faces on them:

See how one has bubbles in its chest? Do you think the kid who ate that noticed? Nope. Or if someone does, just say it’s a feature. That’ll qualify you to work in software sales!

However, there’s an important thing to note about drawing on the faces: the ink will, over the course of about 12 hours, bleed through the gummy and look blurry or even creepy as a result. So don’t put the faces on the night before taking these to a party. Draw the faces on as close to serving time as possible.

Enjoy your minifigs! And remember, if you want to play with some advanced techniques, I’ve got the ebook out on using gummy to make Flexible, Edible Stained Glass.