In a Viral TikTok, a Mother-to-Be Says a Bakery “Ruined” Her Gender Reveal Cake

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We all know the two genders: raspberry and blackberry. I’m kidding, but those two produce aisle staples caused quite a stir online last week after a TikToker aired her fury toward a local bakery that “spoiled” her gender reveal by telling her which fruity filling would be inside her cake.

In the video, TikTok user Ariel — whose username is @morbidmama7 — plays a voicemail from the aforementioned bakery (the name of which is bleeped out in the video) in which an employee asks Ariel to call back regarding her order, because she ordered a single lemon cake with blackberry filling, which the bakery did not have.

Seems like an innocent enough call, right? Well, as Ariel explains via text overlaid on the video, she had asked the bakery to add “raspberries for a girl or blue/blackberries for a boy.” For those of you who haven’t been subjected to the relatively new phenomenon of gender reveals, prospective parents often share — and in some cases, learn it themselves — their baby’s assigned sex at birth by cutting into a cake. The inside of the cake will traditionally feature either blue filling for a boy or pink filling for a girl, setting the table for years of gendered expectations regarding the fetus in question. Yay, gender essentialism!

Nevertheless, gender reveals have become a popular practice for parents-to-be like Ariel, who wasn’t too happy that the bakery’s voicemail revealed the cake’s contents before she could be surprised.

“Imagine paying $$, walking into the bakery with a sealed envelope from a doctor, curating a whole special, intimate moment with you & your partner… just to have some random, careless woman ruin it with a single voicemail… thaaaanks,” she captioned the TikTok. “If my eyes are red, it’s because I’ve been crying all morning.” Ariel shared a handful of other videos about the experience, including one which has the full story behind the voicemail.

Since Ariel shared her video on October 14, it has received over 76,100 likes and 1.7 million views on TikTok. It also achieved minor virality on X.

Of course, some commenters were on Ariel’s side.

“Jody from Salad Bowl Bakery count your days 😭💀🤣,” one TikToker commented.

However, many other viewers were less sympathetic to her disappointment. In one of the original video’s most popular comments, one person questioned why Ariel didn’t have a “gender keeper,” a.k.a. someone who knows the baby’s sex and is in charge of planning the reveal for the parents. Others questioned why the surprise of finding out a child’s assigned sex at birth is so important to people.

“She literally could have spoken with the bakery beforehand regarding substitutions in case of any issues,” one X user who quote-tweeted @MrsJellySantos wrote. “It’s not the job of these workers to be a part of your gender ritual conspiracy.”

“When [cis] people care about shit like this it makes me remember how weird they are,” another X user wrote.

Meanwhile, some people criticized the concept of gender reveals in general.

As one X user put it: “Gender reveals are so stupid because how do you know the gender of someone who isn’t born?”

“THE BAKERY FUCKED UP MY FETAL GENITAL PARTY,” another X user who quote-tweeted @MrsJellySantos’ post joked.

Sure, plenty of viewers found Ariel’s anger with the bakery irritating. Still, in the grand scheme of disastrous gender reveals, it could’ve been much worse. Remember that time when an Iowa family inadvertently crafted a pipe bomb to announce their baby’s sex and accidentally killed a family member in the process? Or that time when the smoke bomb that a California couple set off during a gender reveal started a wildfire that resulted in manslaughter charges? The gender binary is a slippery slope, folks.

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