Just for anybody who is interested. I was working on an iOS project that required similar functionality so I ended porting the answer by @jeznag to swift
private func addMinutesToDate(minutes: Int, beforeDate: NSDate) -> NSDate {
var SIXTY_SECONDS = 60
var m = (Double) (minutes * SIXTY_SECONDS)
var c = beforeDate.timeIntervalSince1970 + m
var newDate = NSDate(timeIntervalSince1970: c)
return newDate
}