How to Hide a T-shirt in a Cake

There’s a bit of a tradition in my family of prank gift wrapping. This year was a real challenge, how could I top myself? (My last one was a real doozy.) I came up with this: wrapping up a ThinkGeek Tshirt for my brother inside of a cake! Creating the appearance of the shirt having been baked inside the cake!

Here’s how I did it:

A baked a cake using an inexpensive cake recipe that uses only one egg, using a 12 inch round pan.

Here’s the cake on the cooling rack. Some edge bits came off, so I glued them back on with icing.

Here’s the sandwich of materials, ready to flip the cake over. You can see the cooling rack, then cake, then cake board (you can buy cake board wherever cake decorating supplies are sold). Then you pick up the whole thing, and swiftly and with confidence, flip it over. Now the cake is on the cake board. Remove the cooling rack.

I put the shirt on top of the cake and cut around it. Then, I gently removed the center of the cake.

Ta da! The shirt is in the cake!

In this photo, you can see I’ve put cake back in, on top of the shirt. Naturally, I cut away the back of each bit of cake before I put it back. This cake turned out to be rather crumbly — a pound cake or even corn bread would have been a better choice. At this point the cake didn’t look convincing at all, and I didn’t have time to start over, so I rolled out some store bought fondant to smooth out the bumpiness, then iced over it.

Ta da! Looks great, doesn’t it?

It’s not enough to hide a shirt in a cake, you also have to wrap it as if it’s a normal present! Here’s a party store cake platter, taped into a box. The smear of icing is there to hold the cake board to the cake platter.

The cake is in the box!

It’s all wrapped up in this super wrapping paper from Archie McPhee, plus my added this side up warning.

Now here’s the unwrapped cake, ready to be cut into by the lucky recipient, my brother Zack!

And, removing the first slice!

It was incredibly funny, and lots of fun to prepare. The cake tasted awful, with all that fondant and an excess of icing, but that didn’t matter. Oh, and he liked the shirt too!