Abby Brody’s 12-week sonogram indicated she was having a girl — but this cake revealed (correctly) she’d be having a boy! (
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Twenty-five excited friends and family members, all wearing pink and blue, gathered at Janine Hafemann’s parents’ house two months ago. There were pink and blue balloons, pink and blue tablecloths and — in the center of the room — an iced cake topped with a big pink-and-blue bow.
But it was the color inside the cake that mattered most.
Slathered between its layers was a secret frosting colored either pink or blue. By cutting through it, the pregnant Hafemann would discover for the first time the sex of her baby.
“I was shaking. It was so hard to control myself,” she recalls. “The anxiety was at an all-time high.”
Finally, Hafemann, 30, and her husband, Paul, 34, gathered their guests for the moment of truth. She steadied her nerves, took Paul’s hand and, together with their wedding-cake cutter, they sliced through the $65 confection.
Blue frosting oozed out. It was a boy!
“I just thought it was so nice that everyone was there at the same time to find out,” says Hafemann, a teacher who lives in Fishkill, NY, and is due in August. “The suspense of the whole thing was probably the best part.”
Finding out the sex of your baby via ultrasound is so last year. Today, couples hoping to personalize their pregnancies are ordering “baby cakes” and turning the big reveal into a party.
Why find out your tot’s gender in the doctor’s office when you can have your nearest and dearest alongside you, as well as a delicious cake? Many parents-to-be are even taking the festivities one step further by posting videos of their reveal parties on YouTube and Facebook.
“Nowadays, everyone learns the baby’s gender in advance, and lately I’ve noticed more and more couples going the traditional route and waiting until the big day to find out,” says Tracy Saelinger, deputy editor of Food Network Magazine.
“But now, there is this happy medium of throwing a baby-cake party. You’re not finding out the news in a sterile environment, but you’re not forced to wait the whole nine months.”
The process of ordering a baby cake is simple. Instead of hearing the news firsthand, an expectant mother will ask her doctor to jot down the baby’s gender on a slip of paper and seal it in an envelope. The woman will then take her envelope to a baker, who will open it privately and decorate the inside of the cake with blue or pink frosting, according to instructions.
Aliyyah Baylor, president of the Make My Cake bakery in Harlem, says baby-cake orders have shot up since she got her first request in October.
“[Now] we’re doing at least five a week,” Baylor says.
But some parenting experts criticize baby-cake parties, saying they can lead to social rejection or — worse — total heartbreak.
“For one, you need to be sure you or your partner doesn’t have his or her heart set on a specific sex for the child,” says Susan Newman, a New Jersey-based parenting expert, social psychologist and best-selling author of 14 books.
She also warns that bashes should be kept intimate.
“If you’re inviting friends over and it resembles a shower, it can be too much of the ‘We are so important, our family is so important that you need to witness everything we do’ thing. Then it’s over the top.”
Millicent Lee, who is due in September, kept her gender-reveal party small and pressure-free. She and husband, Keith, already knew the sex of their baby, but wanted to share the news with friends and family by giving them a sweet reveal.
“I was looking to do something a little different,” says Lee, who ordered a baby cake last month.
When the 15 guests arrived, Lee told them she had some news. They all collected around a cake adorned with pink and blue question marks as she cut through and revealed her baby’s gender: Pink velvet = girl!
“It was fun to watch guests guess and wonder,” says, Lee, an assistant principal who is due in September.
“A lot of people commented on how they thought it was an excellent idea and how wonderful it was.”
Baylor cautions that bakers need to be especially careful with an order like this. “There’s no room for mistakes,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean blunders can’t happen.
Abby Brody was 12 weeks pregnant with her first child when she was told she was having a little girl.
Six weeks later, when she went back for her next sonogram, she asked her doctor to put her baby’s gender in an envelope so she could order a baby cake. (She wanted to follow the usual protocol.)
The next day, she hosted a party for 20 family members and sliced into her confection. When she pulled back the knife, she was shocked by what she saw. The frosting was blue!
“My husband cut into it, and we were like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s blue!’ ” she remembers. “Everyone was shocked.”
She refused to believe the cake, and started tearing through it to make sure there were no signs of pink frosting.
“I hacked into that cake at every angle, because what if they got it wrong?!” she recalls.
It was blue throughout, so Brody checked with her doctor, who informed her that the envelope did indeed contain the word boy. It turned out her earlier sonogram reading was wrong — a common problem when the mother is only three months pregnant.
“I went back to the baker later and told him the story, and he told me he was freaking out because the nurse wrote ‘boy,’ but it was on a pink piece of paper,” laughs
Brody, a 30-year-old teacher who lives in SoHo.
Brody, who is due to give birth this summer, says her sugar shock hasn’t put her off baby cakes. She’d do it again if she has another kid.
“Just becoming pregnant is such an incredible journey to begin with,” she says, “so anything you can do to include your family is a time to celebrate.”
dschuster@nypost.com