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Predictive Pastry

If Gender Cakes can reveal whether your child will be a boy or a girl—and, in a new trend, they can—just think of all the other life questions that can be answered by clever foodstuffs

by
Marjorie Ingall
May 31, 2011

Have you heard about these “Baby Cake” or “Gender Cake” parties? They’re a thing: A pregnant woman has her doctor write the baby’s gender and seal it in an envelope, which a bakery then uses to bake a cake that’s either pink or blue, under a layer of gender-neutral-colored fondant. When she cuts the cake at her baby shower (or random carb-loading party), she and her partner and everybody else learn the gender of her spawn-to-be. It’s a strange goyish shower-dessert trend to add to the “Hey, let’s eat our ultrasound photo” fad. “Let them eat baby,” as blogger Lizzie Skurnick so aptly put it.

What other predictive foodstuffs might we offer anxious, expecting Jewish parents?

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID GOLDIN

Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children.

Marjorie Ingall is a former columnist for Tablet, the author of Mamaleh Knows Best, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.