Woman Has 10 Minutes to Transform Store-Bought Cake for Friend’s Baby Shower — and Somehow Pulls It Off (Exclusive)

It only took a few minutes, some flowers and cake filling for Julie Zhang to turn a simple shopping spree into an elegant dessert for a friend’s baby shower.

The Dallas-based content creator and former travel nurse showed off her last-minute creative skills in a now-viral TikTok video with over 466,000 likes.

In the video, Zhang — who tells PEOPLE she has “never baked a cake in her life” — used a spatula to precariously stack two Berry Chantilly cakes from Whole Foods on top of each other.

“POV, you have 10 minutes to make a cake for your best baby,” Zhang captioned the video in an overlapping text. In the title she added: “Master of Manipulation”.

Despite her initially shaky build and mid-video realization that she “looked worse than I thought,” she rose to the occasion under pressure. After making sure the towering cake wouldn’t topple over, Zhang used Amazon-bought decorations to cover up any blemishes on the pre-iced layers.

After topping her impromptu masterpiece with the “Oh Baby” topper, she revealed one last glimpse of her friend Jean, who was waiting for the cake, posing with the cake. “She loved it,” Zhang wrote with a heart emoji.

Julie Zhang’s baby cake.

Courtesy of Julie Zhang

The quick-thinking TikToker told PEOPLE how she found herself with so little time to pull off her impressive feat. Although the baby shower was planned months in advance, Zhang — who shared party planning duties with Jean’s sister-in-law — says she never set out to cook something from scratch.

“My waffles and pancakes got burnt, so I have a lot of respect for bakeries. I know it would be a disaster if I tried to bake any kind of cake,” Zhang tells PEOPLE. “I wanted to buy her a Berry Chantilly cake from Whole Foods because it’s our favorite cake that we would give each other on birthdays in the past.”

Julie Zhang with her friend Jean.

Courtesy of Julie Zhang

To make sure they were fresh, Zhang only bought the cakes a day in advance, but she couldn’t assemble the centerpiece dessert until they arrived at the church where the baby shower was being held.

“I knew I had to make the cake on location because it would have tipped over if I had transported it in my car and it would have been difficult to cover,” she explains.

The clock really started ticking when she realized she couldn’t enter the church until an hour and a half before the party started. In addition, a balloon arch had to be built and a dessert board set up.

Julie Zhang baby cake.

Courtesy of Julie Zhang

While most commentators admired Zhang’s innovative performance, she says she also faced harsh criticism.

“People had a lot of negative comments that I was a terrible best friend and that I should have baked the cake myself or ordered it,” she notes, although she points out that Jean was more than happy, “which is the only thing that matters! ”

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education