Two shop workers in a town in the French Alps had to be admitted to hospital after unwittingly eating hash cakes given to them by a regular customer, who wanted to have a giggle at their expense.

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The customer entered the shop in Gaillard, in the Alpine region of Haute Savoie and handed the cakes to the store manager and his employee, who gratefully accepted the goodies without asking any questions.

“It was one of our regular customers and he just offered us some cakes he said he had made at home and we wolfed them down,” one the shopkeepers named Gwendoline told France’s RTL radio.

Unbeknown to them, however, their customer had stitched them up "because he wanted to have a joke", but his victims were clearly not up for a giggle.

“We started to have some strange effects. I became high as a kite, but my boss was away with the fairies. We just had to close the shop and call an ambulance,” Gwendoline said.

Tests in the hospital later revealed the two had been intoxicated by cannabis.

The 40-year-old cake-maker was later arrested by police. According to RTL, he admitted to officers adding five grams of cannabis to the mixture, as instructed by a recipe he found on the internet.