UK mum's stock image 'happy birthday' Facebook message costs her $380

The stock image cake.
The cake caused quite a stir. Photo credit: Twitter/Facebook/Lauren Faulkner

This story was first published in September 2019.

A UK mum's innocent birthday message to her daughter's friend on Facebook ended up costing her £200 (NZ$380).

Virginia Kavanagh had seen on social media that a close friend of her daughter was turning 18. She decided to share a happy birthday message to the teen, named Beth, using a stock image of a personalised birthday cake inspired by Disney's Frozen she found on Google. 

The extravagant cake features Frozen characters Olaf and Elsa, and has the name 'Beth' and 'Happy 18th Birthday' written in icing. 

"Happy 18th birthday princess, hope you have a wonderful day, you have always been our favourite!" Kavanagh, from Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote the sweet message alongside the Googled image.

But Kavanagh's good intentions soon spiralled into a very pricey mistake.

"OMG can't believe this! Thank you so much, Virginia and Stephen! I'll need to pop round today and have some," 18-year-old Beth commented on the mum's post.

When Kavanagh realised that Beth had mistaken the picture for a real-life cake, she didn't have the heart to tell the birthday girl that the cake was not for her - or even made.

"My mum felt too bad to admit it wasn't hers, to she paid £200 to get a replica made for the next day," tweeted Kavanagh's daughter, Lauren Faulkner, on Wednesday (local time).

The amusing, but adorable mix-up was recounted by Faulkner on Twitter more than three years after the cake debacle.

"To this day I still think about when my mum found this random cake on Google," Faulker wrote on Twitter.

Social media users loved the story, with Faulkner's post gaining over 107,000 likes. 

Faulkner followed up on the saga, posting screenshots of a text exchange with her mum about her new-found Twitter fame.

"Yes, poor me! I felt so bad for Beth, I wanted to cry!" Kavanagh texted her daughter.

"What you failed to add is she then didn't eat the feckin thing and left it at ours to go hard and I was furious!"

However, Twitter's outpouring of sympathy for Kavanagh three years on must have been the icing on a very expensive cake.

Newshub.