This Gender Reveal Cake Will Be the Centerpiece of Your Baby Shower

Christine RukavenaUpdated: Jul. 12, 2022

Spoiler alert: This cake has the sweetest surprise inside.

There’s nothing more special than having a baby on the way. Nowadays, expecting parents go to great lengths to plan over-the-top gender reveal parties for their bun in the oven. Some reveals involve popping balloons filled with colored confetti or unwrapping a tell-tale gift—but we prefer our surprises to be much sweeter.

That’s why we asked our Test Kitchen to break down the best steps on making a fail-proof-and super sweet-gender reveal cake.

If you’re a mother-to-be, share this recipe and your unopened test results with a trusted friend! This way, you’ll be just as surprised when you take the first slice. (But if you can’t resist the urge to know beforehand, we totally understand.)

How to Make a Gender Reveal Cake

Ingredients

Two 8-in.round layer cakes
Blue frosting (for a boy) or pink frosting (for a girl)
White frosting

To make this from scratch, follow our Gender Reveal Cake recipe.

In this recipe, we’ll be hiding the colored frosting between the cake-y layers. Some recipes call for a tinted cake, but we find that changing the color of the batter can lead to discoloration. Think brownish hues-yuck! For best results, we recommend sticking to coloring the frosting instead of the batter.

Test Kitchen Tip: To give the most oomph to your frosting, color it using paste food coloring. This will help give it a nice vivid color without changing the consistency or taste.

Piping a single layer of white frosting onto a layer of cake on a serving plate

Step 1: Create a Border

Place one cake layer on a serving plate. Pipe a circle of white frosting around top edge of layer. If you don’t have a piping bag on hand, that’s OK; in a pinch you can snip a hole off the corner of a Ziplock baggie.

Just be sure to pipe a thick line of frosting. It’s going to be the barrier that conceals the colored frosting inside.

Person spreading a cup of blue frosting into the middle of a thick layer of white frosting

Step 2: Fill With Blue or Pink Icing

Next, carefully spread a single cup of the pink or blue frosting inside the white frosting. It’s important to be precise so there are no leaky giveaways, but feel free to layer on liberally-after all, it’s the most crucial part of the big reveal.

Step 3: Finish it Off

Once finished, place the second cake layer on top. You’ll want to cover the top and sides with a nice layer of creamy white frosting, too.

To replicate our decorations, use a #8 tip and white frosting, to pipe pearls around top and bottom edge of cake. Then, using a #12 tip, pipe blue and pink dots over cake. Lastly, inscribe a cute message on top using a #4 tip. Here we chose “It’s a…”, but feel free to be fun (and personal) with it!

More of a cupcake person?

Person cuts a dome shape out of the center of an unfrosted cupcake with a knife. Also, a person piping blue frosting into the middle of the dome cut-out they made before

After baking a batch of cupcakes, use a small serrated knife to cut domes into their fluffy tops.

Test Kitchen tip: Grapefruit or paring knives work best.

Next, pipe the “reveal” icing inside the dome. You’ll want to cover the tops with extra icing to conceal. At the party, you can pass a plate of these surprise cupcakes around and tell the room to take a big bite to reveal.

Three cupcakes with swirled pink and blue frosting with blue filling showing through one cut in half

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Pink Velvet CupcakesMy daughter loves all things pink, so this recipe was just right for her birthday. Even my teenage son (not a fan of pink) ate his share, too. —Paulette Smith, Winston-Salem, North Carolina