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Pictures have emerged of the 'beautiful piece of chocolate cake' which President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were eating when he decided to inform his guest about the US missile attack on a Syrian airfield.

Trump told Fox Business interviewer Maria Bartiromo: 'I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We're now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it.

Now a photograph has been posted on Instagram of the cake the pair were eating at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when the President decided to break the news.

Lawyer Lucas A Ferrara posted the picture and wrote: 'Want a slice of Trump? (Then you have to try his chocolate cake).'

'And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do?' Trump explained. 'And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way. And I said, 'Mr. President, let me explain something to you.'

'This was during dessert,' he reemphasized.

'So what happens is I said we've just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this. And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.'

Bartiromo then corrected that the president meant to say Syria, where the U.S. launched strikes following a chemical weapons attack that the U.S. says President Bashar al-Assad conducted on his own people.

Trump said he decided to inform Xi to avoid an even more awkward situation.

'And I want you to know that, because I didn't want him to go home. We were almost finished. It was a full day in Palm Beach. We're almost finished and I – what does he do, finish his dessert and go home and then they say, you know, the guy you just had dinner with just attacked a country?' Trump said.

Asked how the often stone-faced Chinese leader responded, Trump said: 'So he paused for 10 seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again. I didn't think that was a good sign.'

'And he said to me, anybody that uses gases – you could almost say or anything else – but anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that young children and babies, it's okay.'

Asked directly whether Xi agreed with the strike, Trump said: 'He was okay with it. He was okay.'

China's foreign ministry took a much harsher view of the attack, according to a statement picked up in the Russian state media.

China has long inveighed against what it considers U.S. military aggression and interference in other nations' affairs, making a new Middle East attack a delicate diplomatic situation.

Trump teased the story when asked how it came about, and didn't bat down the suggestion that 'right there, you're saying a reminder, here's who the superpower in the world is, right?'

'You have no idea how many people want to hear the answer to this. I have watched speculation for three days now on what that was like,' he said, prompting Bartiromo to ask if it happened 'before dessert or what?'