I recently found myself in possession of a box of Reduced Sugar Fruit Pebbles. I won't say much about how they came to arrive at my home, other than the story involves the kindness of at least one anonymous soul, the further generosity of a local church and the health kick of a neighbor who has more sense than I. Anyway, we eat very little cold cereal around here and the Boy Wonder was disinclined to experiment with the genre solely on the basis of perusing the box (he is not, after all, familiar with the Flinstones and so felt no compunction to patronize their cereal, unlike what his response might have been to, say, a Buzz Aldrin cereal).

I remembered back in my college days my dorm mates and I making a batch of Fruity Pebbles treats - nothing more than your basic Rice Krispie treats subsituting the Pebbles for the Krispies. I thought this would be a fun way to use the Pebbles as a super-special kid treat, something we could make and enjoy and never speak of again. Since I couldn't remember the marshmallow-to-Pebbles ratio I googled the recipe. Imagine my surprise to end up on a page of something called Recipes of the Damned. Damned? Sure, they're not, you know, like, actual food or anything, but "damned" seems rather harsh.

In the end we were not disuaded by their accursed status and made the treats (for the record: 4 tablespoons of melted butter, 40 large marshmallows, six cups of Fruity Pebbles and one, ahem, hell of a mess). No one liked them very much, but that stopped none of us from having more than one three or four.

In further news, we have decided to have an egg hunt next month. I have several dozen of those stuffable plastic eggs, lots of room to run around and know any number of four year olds we can let loose in search of the hidden eggs. So an egg hunt seemed the obvious thing to do. We're not doing the traditional brunch, mostly because I don't need that kind of stress, but rather will serve what I call "treats" - cake and cookies, maybe fruit skewers with a yogurt/maple dip, veggies and hummus and probably some kind of crostini or something. The cake will be carrot, natch. In thinking about it, I dimly recalled a long ago episode of Martha Stewart Living wherein a cake was prepared to look like a garden - crushed Oreo paths, white sugar paste gate, tiny marzipan veggies. I just adore marzipan and figure that alone is reason to make the cake, not even taking into account its thematic appropriateness.

So I googled the recipe and immediately found a page on...can you guess?...Recipes of the Damned.

I wish I was making this up. Two hits to apparently damned recipes within the space of no more than three days. I do not know what this means in realm of culinary spirituality but it cannot be good.