This might be of interest to dessert fans: A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts by Holly Gramazio of raspberrydebacle.com http://tinyurl.com/yumzqh Excerpt: What are the fundamental dessert types, the metaphorical atoms of dessert, or "dessertoms"? A brownie is very "stable", which is to say it can be combined with many different desserts while still remaining delicious -- but surely it isn't a fundamental dessert type: a brownie is basically just a sulky teenage cake. A crepe, on the other hand, probably is a fundamental dessert type, but it's a relatively unstable one -- it won't taste good if you put it on a cookie. Furthermore, desserts can be transformed not just through the application of another sort of dessert, adding dessert type A to dessert type B, but also by the application of a Dessert Function. Dessert Functions are things like "freeze it", "put nuts on it", "take out all the flour", "cover it in alcohol and set it on fire" -- stuff you can do to any dessert that has a good chance of leaving it edible, or better still transforming it into an exciting new dessert. Clearly this is a topic that requires for further discussion: 1. a rigorously defined vocabulary; 2. extensive research to discover the fundamental dessert types; 3. some sort of consistency in what "applying dessert type A to dessert type B" actually entails; and 4. Lots of little pictures on graph paper. --dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx