Would You Throw a Gender Reveal Party?

Three years ago, a client walked into the catering company I was working for at the time and asked me to help her plan a gender reveal cake for an upcoming party she and her husband were throwing.

She had just come from her 18-week ultrasound appointment, and presented me with a small envelope that contained the gender of her baby. She hadn’€™t looked at the envelope’s contents, but was wondering if we could create a cake that was tinted either pink or blue, depending on what was written on the small slip of paper, and cover the entire confection in thick chocolate icing so no one could detect the colour of the cake within. At the party they would cut into it and reveal the sex of the baby to their friends and family based on the colour of the cake.

I had never heard of such a thing, but the pastry chef and I decided this was surely going to become popular with prospective parents, and promptly added the special cake to the menu.

It turns out we were right.

Gender reveal discussion boards on popular parenting websites have multiplied at rapid speed, and over 200,000 gender reveal party videos are currently uploaded to YouTube. This new pre-parenting custom is sometimes a replacement for the more traditional baby shower, although there are many parents-to-be who fete their baby in both ways.

While the coloured cake idea was one of the original ways to celebrate the sex of an unborn baby, creative ideas have been popping up on lifestyle blogs and Pinterest. From the unwrapping of blue or pink pajamas at Christmas to one couple who took their family to a baseball game and revealed the gender with the colour of cotton candy they selected, there is no limit to the number of ways this can be done.

Tell us: would you throw a gender reveal party? Did you have one? If so, how did you share the news?