Surprise! Cakes containing the unexpected

Feast your eyes on a traditional king cake: sagging with sugar, fluorescent with frosting, and containing one small plastic baby. If you get the bit with the tot it's your job to get bake a cake for tomorrow. The baby pictured above has evidently been unearthed, bathed and lovingly balanced atop the icing. Here you can just see one emerging creepily from the crumbs
Photograph: Philip Scalia/Alamy

The thunk of dentures on metal, the awful gulp, the wheezing and the choking and the wail of sirens - all familiar yuletide noises in the UK, thanks to our habit of storing loose change inside Christmas puds
Photograph: Steve Sant/Alamy

A great treat for Debbie Reynolds fans; a blow for those who thought they were definitely going to get seconds. Ladies leaping, almost certainly singing, from cakes is a time-honoured high society tradition. But chefs (as seen in the background) rarely approve
Photograph: Cinetext/MGM/Allstar

Shock and awe is, of course, a tried and trusted sales method for flogging off pricey sweeties. The recipient of this Kinder Surprise egg has been so thrilled by the microcar they've forgotten to eat the choccie
Photograph: David Sillitoe

Yum! What new mum doesn't dream of receiving a five tier cake fashioned entirely from nappies? Kat's Diaper Cakes are "carefully hand crafted in a smoke-free and clean environment" and feature a selection for girls, another for boys - and a "neutral range"
Photograph: Handypix/Alamy

Here's one sweet treat whose innards are never a surprise. Who has ever benefited from a genuine insight from a fortune cookie? What real value is there in such iffy banalities as "Luck sometimes visits a fool, but it never sits down with him", or "Happiness isn't something you remember, it's something you experience". Far better something actually informative, like "Never end a nice meal with an old biscuit"
Photograph: Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

One of the trades descriptions people here. Bite into a pond pudding and you'll have primed your tastebuds for old fish and duckweed. Instead: a mouthful of lemon comes your way. A happy shock, then, but mis-selling none the less
Photograph: Bon Appetit/Alamy

Sponge evangelists will have their fruit cake paranoia confirmed by this crumbly number. Two years ago, former hospital cook Yvonne Cooper laced her unfaithful husband's fruit cake with rat poison. But she was spared prison as the cake plot was deemed a cry for help. For the poison to have proved fatal, he'd have had to eat 1,500 slices - fairly unhealthy in itself
Photograph: Gloucestershire Crown Prosecutio/PA

The big shock here is that peanuts come from monkey nuts. The small shock is how rubbish Martha Stewart's Chocolate Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies are. Surely even the least observant would be able to have a stab at guessing the mystery filling? Photograph: David Burton/guardian.co.uk

A talking urinal cake, one of some 500 resident in various gents' restrooms around New Mexico with the intention of shock-nagging boozy drivers just before they set off home. Sadly the chocolate-covered urinal cake Patrick Bateman feeds to his girlfriend in American Psycho was neither so well-labelled nor so chatty
Photograph: Jake Schoellkopf/AP