These sneaky April Fools’ Day food pranks take the holiday’s shenanigans to a whole new level
Some people are born pranksters. Others are born victims. I am the latter. I am so gullible that my family has made it their life’s mission to exploit this at every opportunity—and for some reason, they almost always do it through food. There was the April Fools’ Day my mom handed me a glass of “orange juice” that turned out to be Jell-O. The year my brother swapped the Oreo filling for toothpaste (a classic!) and watched me take an enormous, confident bite. And the time my dad served “ice cream” that was, in fact, a scoop of ice-cold mashed potatoes. The joke was on him with that one—I flippin’ love mashed potatoes!
The sad thing is, I have learned nothing. I remain completely foolable. But lucky for you, it’s made me a connoisseur of April Fools’ Day food pranks. If you’re looking to terrorize someone you love—a kid, a co-worker, a partner who trusts you far too much (the fool!)—food pranks on April 1 are the way to go. They’re both harmless and hilarious, and the payoff is delicious.
Inspired by the many, many (MANY) times I’ve been humiliated, here are the best April Fools’ Day pranks to pull this year, guaranteed to deliver loads of laughs with zero actual damage. Read on to choose your favorite—for your favorite mark.
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Not your grandma’s iced tea
Pour cold beef broth over ice in a tall glass, add a lemon wedge and a straw. The color is perfect. The betrayal is immediate.
Chocolate-covered onions
Melt chocolate, dip a peeled onion in it (making sure to cover every bit of it), and let it harden on wax paper just like a chocolate-covered apple. Stick in a lollipop stick for the full effect. This is the kind of prank for kids that they bring up years later … and possibly go to therapy for.
The ketchup–sour cream flip
Mix a small amount of red food coloring into sour cream until you hit that confident ketchup red. A single drop of yellow warms the tone and takes it from “suspiciously pink” to “completely believable.” Chill it for 20 minutes so it firms back up to ketchup consistency, and funnel it into a ketchup bottle. Then ask your victim if they’d love their fries with ketchup.
The backward sandwich
Look at you being all helpful and making your partner or child lunch! (Cue the evil laugh.) Whip up a sandwich with the fillings on the outside and the bread in the middle. Wrap it up like everything is normal, and go about your day. You might not be there for the big reveal, but you’ll certainly hear about it later!
Crunchy pasta
Serve a bowl of buttered noodles that look perfect—but snap when they’re bitten. Their brain says pasta; their teeth say absolutely not. The key here is to use farfalle (aka bowtie) or fusilli pasta that looks the same uncooked as it does cooked. Pro tip: Toss it lightly in melted butter and a pinch of salt so it glistens like the real thing!
The invisible hot sauce upgrade
Put one to three drops of a medium hot sauce (Tabasco is ideal) into something creamy and familiar, like pasta or scrambled eggs. Stir until it disappears completely … at least to the naked eye. The victim of this April Fools’ Day food prank will finish a whole bite, maybe two, before an alarm in their brain goes off and they’re grabbing the nearest glass of water.
Nacho normal nachos
Swap the sour cream on nachos or a baked potato for whipped cream. It’s that simple, and that hilarious.
The suspicious cookie
This April Fools’ joke is completely customizable. Bake something strange into a completely normal-looking batch of chocolate chip cookies—a swirl of mashed potatoes (tell people it’s cream cheese) or a single pickle slice hidden in the middle. Let your imagination guide you into cookie chaos! Or if you don’t want to bake, go with the toothpaste-in-Oreos prank that my brother played on me. (Hey, there’s a reason it’s a classic!)
Turned milk
Freeze a few drops of blue or purple food coloring into an ice cube. Drop it into a glass of cold white milk without comment and hand it over. As it melts, the milk shifts from white to a soft, unsettling lavender. If you want a more defensible option, try freezing butterfly pea flower tea into cubes. It does the same thing and technically counts as an ingredient. Either way, nobody wants purple milk. That’s a fact!
The salad that betrayed you
The trick here isn’t to make the salad look obviously sweet; it’s to make it look completely normal until the first bite. Cut honeydew into thin cucumber-shaped slices. Use cubes of pound cake as croutons. Dress it with vanilla cream thinned just enough to pass as a light vinaigrette. The lettuce is real. Everything else is dessert. Bon appetit!
The sealed snack-bag switch
Pour M&M’s into an empty Skittles bag (or vice versa). Same size, similar colors, completely different flavor. The brain expects fruit and receives chocolate. You could also carefully open a chip bag from the bottom, remove the chips, fill the bag with baby carrots, and then reseal it with a warm hair straightener. The person opens the bag thinking they’re getting Doritos. Think again!
Cake that isn’t cake
Serve a perfectly frosted, beautifully decorated cake … that’s actually meatloaf. The fancier and more pastel, the better. They’ll never suspect a thing before they attempt to cut it and take a piece.
A Jell-O’ed cup of joe
This one starts with a nice premise: You’re doing something kind by bringing in coffee for your co-worker—except it’s Jell-O that just looks like coffee. Here’s how to do it: Dissolve unflavored gelatin in cold brew, and let it set overnight in a takeout coffee cup. It will look exactly like a full cup of coffee. Hot coffee on top would melt the Jell-O, so leave it as is: cold, solid, and handed over like nothing’s wrong. When your prankee tips the mug to drink, nothing comes out. Good stuff. Bonus: Your co-worker is a much easier mark when they’re not caffeinated yet!
Deviled-egg dessert
Pipe vanilla pudding into hard-boiled egg-white halves. From across a table, they are indistinguishable from deviled eggs. Serve them at a potluck right next to an actual deviled-egg platter.
The “sealed” yogurt swap
Carefully peel back the lid of a single-serve yogurt without fully removing it. Replace the yogurt with sour cream or mayo, then press the lid back down so it looks unopened. Return it to the fridge.
The frozen condiment bottle
Freeze a bottle of ketchup, mustard or salad dressing overnight. Put it back in the fridge before serving. When someone tries to use it, nothing will come out … except maybe an expletive directed at you when they figure it out.
Oatmeal raisin cookie swap
Swap sun-dried tomatoes for raisins in an oatmeal cookie: similar color, same chewiness, same irregular shape in the dough. The cookie bakes up looking completely normal. Gotcha!
The doughnut-filling switch
Use a piping tip to remove the filling from a jelly doughnut, and replace it with mustard, mayo or another savory spread. Wipe off any excess so it looks untouched, and prepare to get yelled at. Such is the price you pay for being such a glorious prankster!
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Reader’s Digest has been telling jokes for more than 100 years, curated and reviewed over the last 20 years by Senior Features Editor Andy Simmons, a humor editor formerly of National Lampoon and the author of Now That’s Funny. We’ve earned prestigious ASME awards for our humor—including comical quips, pranks, puns, cartoons, one-liners, knock-knock jokes, riddles, memes, tweets and stories in laugh-out-loud magazine columns such as “Life in These United States,” “All in a Day’s Work,” “Laughter, the Best Medicine” and “Humor in Uniform,” as well as online collections such as short jokes, dad jokes and bad jokes so bad, they’re great. You can find a century of humor in our 2022 compendium, Reader’s Digest: Laughter, the Best Medicine. For this story on April Fools’ Day food pranks, Laura Beck tapped her 15-plus years of experience as a professional humor writer for TV shows and magazines. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
