Proud Muffin's cute bike-delivery person, Harley (he or they - it's always on the pronoun pin check first) is surprisingly receptive to Syd's magical baking confession and, even better, ready to help mend broken hearts across the city. Every pastry chef knows you have to clean up your own kitchen, but now that the Breakup Brownies have drawn the Proud Muffin into their vortex, Syd is even more frantic to correct this magical mistake before it inadvertently causes the best queer bakeshop in Austin to shut down.

Things get even worse when Syd witnesses the bakery’s owners - and husbands - Vin and Alec eat the treats and start fighting, too. Obviously, Syd feels awful and wants to erase the 'special tang of guilt that comes with subtracting so much queer love from the world.' Instead of letting Syd process those pent-up feelings, Syd has accidentally fed several customers brownies that precipitate their own breakups - whether the splits are warranted or not. Syd's baking catharsis takes a turn when the post-breakup goodies turn out to be magical Breakup Brownies with all of Syd's anger, frustration, and hurt baked in. Still smarting from the breakup and feeling blindsided, Syd does the obvious thing for a teen holding down a job as a baker while finishing high school: try to bake it out with an easy recipe for brownies that 'require three things: a single bowl, a sturdy spoon, and a dedication to dark chocolate.' As Syd notes, 'I think she’s great, and she thinks I like having a girlfriend too much to notice that sometimes she isn’t.' Four years later, it turns out the relationship Syd thought was perfect has more cracks than a badly set cheesecake, leading to a drawn-out breakup with W over one painful weekend. Syd (no pronouns, please) has been with the same girlfriend since coming out as queer in middle school.

Seventeen-year-old Syd, who works at the Proud Muffin, is an 'agender cupcake' with a lot to figure out about love and the literal magic of baking.

The heartbreak bakery