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There was once a man whose girlfriend left him to pursue a career in making love and relationships with other men. He spent many of the weeks after the breakup curled up in a meat shaped ball, crying out her name and banging his fists on his head. He was in a bad way.

A month had passed and still he spent most of his time in the ball of pain and punches, but with the arrival of his birthday he decided that he could take no more. He stood up, stretched out his legs and marched to the living room where a birthday party was being held in his honour.

The party was in full swing and as he gazed upon the faces of his friends and family he realised that there was no need to be sad anymore. There was life before his girlfriend and there would be life again without her.

Sadly, the man's best friend (not a dog) had made a bold attempt at humour when choosing the birthday cake. Instead of the typical cake design of Eric Cantona or Thomas the Tank Engine, the man's friend decided to have the cake iced in a way that replicated the exact face of the man's lost love.

When confronted with this dessert of tragic horror, the man did not cry. He put on a brave face, a face filled with a false smile. Oh, how everyone laughed. "Classic Barry!" the man heard someone yell.

As the words to Happy Birthday began to come to a close, the man became sadder than ever before in his life. His first instinct to return to the ball of pain and punches was quickly replaced by a desire to stand up perfectly straight. Forever. He would become a living statue, free from the troubles of life.

However, after some minutes of silence passed, people started to become concerned. He had remained motionless since the final "to youuuuuu" and the candles were burned down to almost nothing. The melted wax on the girl's icing based face looked like the rainbow filled tears of a clown. Upon noticing this, the man became consumed by the thought that maybe wherever she was, his former lover was just as sad as he was.

The crowd began to chant "Blow out the candles!" and "Make a wish!" both out of worry for the man's mental state and their own desire for cake. Their cries gave him the courage to leave his frozen state. He leaned forward and began to blow out the thirty-one candles, wishing that the only girl he'd ever loved was with him again.

Within a millionth of a second of the last candle being extinguished, a terrible shriek sounded from within the deep layers of the sponge, possibly from the cream, maybe from the jam. Five fingers shot out from the side, followed swiftly by a wrist and an arm. The man jumped back in terror, because his initial thought that Barry had got him one of those strippers in a cake. The man had long lived in fear of being confronted by a stripper at a birthday party and having to recieve a lapdance in front of his parents and cousins as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Although he soon dismissed the idea of there being a naked woman inside his cake, because of simple mathematics. The cake was only six inches tall and twelve inches wide. There was no room for a woman in there, clothed or otherwise.

What the cake contained was far more sinister than a stripper. As the minutes passed more limbs began to hatch from the coconut flaked walls. After a drawn out struggle, two fully formed woman's legs emerged, allowing the cake to stand. After the legs came the to torso and the neck. Stood before the man, with the body of a woman and the face of a cake was the woman who had broken the man's heart.

The room became a giant collective gasp as she began to speak. "I'm sorry I left you, David." she said. "It was a mistake." David didn't know what to say. Was this really the girl he'd sworn to love forever? The last time he'd seen her she'd had a human head, with real hair and three dimensions. This woman with a body of flesh, but a flat cartoon face resting on a square bed of marzipan couldn't really be her, could it?

"Is it really you?" he asked.

"I don't know what you mean." she replied.

"Was it really a mistake?" he asked, checking her naked body for the familiar marks and scars that he'd seen a million times before. They were all there.

"Yes." she said "I shouldn't have left." That was all he needed to hear. David took her by the hand and led her to his bedroom, stopping to kiss her artificially coloured face, which left a massive tongue sized hole in her cheek. Once in the room he pushed her onto the bed and locked the door.

An hour later, the man walked back to the living room, where the entire party had remained paused since the moment he left. His face was covered with jam and his hair was filled with sponge.

"She's dead." he wept.