You are misunderstanding what SDF does. It returns a Date object, not the String representation of that object. And while a Date object has all that baggage that you're not interested in, you shouldn't care too much about it, since to get a similar String representation of the Date returned, simply use the same or a similar SDF object and use it to format the date:
String stringRep = mySDF.format(myDate);
As an aside, note that whenever code is written with a catch block that returns null, a puppy dies somewhere.
Edit
For example,
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
public class SdfFun {
private static final String PATTERN = "MM/dd";
private static final SimpleDateFormat SDF = new SimpleDateFormat(PATTERN);
public static Date getAlphaDate(int month, int day) throws ParseException {
String tempDate = month + "/" + day;
return SDF.parse(tempDate);
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
Date date = null;
try {
date = getAlphaDate(2, 16);
System.out.println(SDF.format(date));
} catch (ParseException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}