A young Manhattan woman split open her breakfast muffin — only to find what seemed to be a condom baked inside.
Theresa VanHorn, a 29-year-old writer at MTV Networks, said she was eating a carrot-nut cream-cheese-topped muffin from her office building's bodega on West 50th Street when she found a piece of latex baked into the crumbly delicacy.
"I ate almost half the muffin before discovering it," VanHorn said. "Then it was like slow motion when I pulled it out — I was screaming."
Since the incident last Tuesday morning, she said she's lost her appetite.
VanHorn called the Health Department to report it, but was told not to bother.
"Go ahead and throw away the evidence," a representative told her over the phone, VanHorn said.
"We won't get to your complaint for days, or maybe weeks."
The representative added that the department routinely gets complaints of foreign objects in food and doesn't have time to deal with them all immediately.
The owner of the bodega — which does not bake or alter the muffins it purchases from Sensible Edibles bakery — said he would stop carrying the bakery's products
The well-known bakery in Long Island City, Queens, stocks the shelves of nearly 300 upscale local delis and most hotels in the city — including The Plaza, according to David Moarsi, its owner.
Moarsi denied his company was responsible for creating the questionable muffin — despite the muffin's picture and name being listed as a product on his business' Web site.
Sensible Edibles "is wall-to-wall inspected every two months," Moarsi said. "We haven't had one small complaint since 1992," when the bakery opened.
The owner of the bodega, which also receives muffins from another supplier, International Delight, provided inventory records showing the muffin had been supplied by Sensible Edibles.
Two International Delight employees contacted by The Post confirmed that the company does not make cream-cheese-covered muffins.
In the meantime, VanHorn is considering legal action, and Moarsi wants a lab to analyze the muffin — at a cost of nearly $600 — to prove whether or not it came from his bakery.
A city Health Department representative examined it on Thursday, but said the New York state Department of Agriculture and Markets would continue with the investigation.
