One of my friends is expecting a baby in February, and when she said she and her husband were planning to have a gender reveal party, I practically jumped out of my seat and begged her to let me make the cake.

When I was in college, my roommate Raquel and I used to bake all the time and we got pretty good when it came to decorating cupcakes. I hadn't really decorated a full cake before but I knew I wanted to fill the cake with colored candy instead of dying the batter, and it turned out so cute! I was so excited about how it turned out and my friends loved it, so I wanted to share how I did it here on the blog.

Supplies/Ingredients:

2-3 boxes of cake mix (I used 3 for this but you could easily do 2--you'll need to make enough for 4 round cake pans)
Eggs, oil, and water according to package directions
Frosting: I used 1 blue, 1 pink, and 3 white (this was more than enough)
Piping bag and frosting tips (I used flower and star tips)
Blue or pink M&Ms, or any other candy (this doesn't even have to be a gender thing, it's just a fun party cake!)

Instructions:

Bake cakes according to package instructions. Allow to cool completely. (I made the cakes the night before and cooled them on my counter before refrigerating them in plastic zip-lock bags overnight.)
With a serrated knife, cut the very top (rounded) layer off all four cakes. This allows them to stack evenly.
Take two of the cake layers and use a wide glass to remove a circle from the center of each. These pieces will go in the middle of the cake and store the candy surprise!
Layer the first whole/no-hole piece of cake on a large plate or cake dish and use some frosting to lightly cover only the top of it. What I did here is use some blue frosting because my friends are having a boy (!) and I wanted the frosting inside to be colored. Stack one of the pieces with a hole in it on top and repeat the frosting on the top. Add the other piece with the hole and frost the top.
Fill the hollow cake with candy and add the top layer of cake. Frost with white icing and then cover the sides of the cake with white frosting as well. Once the entire outside of the cake is covered with white frosting and smoothed to your liking, refrigerate for about 30 minutes.
Now it's time to decorate! I used blue and pink frosting to cover the cake with flowers and then mixed the leftover colored icing with some white to make a lighter version of each color, and then I filled in any blank spots of the cake with a star tip. Decorate your cake however you want! The design I did was pretty simple and managed to be pretty impressive in the end.
Refrigerate cake until ready to present/serve. If you've filled it with chocolate candy like I did, make sure you don't leave it out on a hot day!