Suggest me a Dessert

What this tool does

You want something sweet. Maybe dinner is finished and the meal is not quite over in your head, or maybe it is mid-afternoon and a craving has shown up. Either way, you know you want a dessert and you cannot land on which one. This tool picks for you. It hands you a dessert at random from a hand-picked list of sweets, so you can stop weighing flavours in your mind and go have one.

Press the button for a dessert. Press it again for another. Ask for a few at once if you would rather choose from a short list than take the first thing offered.

How to use it

1. Number / Quantity. How many desserts to pull at once, from 1 to 100.
2. Generate. Pulls a fresh dessert, or a fresh set if you asked for several.
3. Starts with, Contains, Ends with. Optional filters that narrow the sweets before it picks. Leave them blank to draw from everything.
4. Copy. Sends what is on screen to your clipboard as a plain list.

A dessert is already on screen when the page loads, so there is always something to react to.

How it works

The list is fixed and each press pulls from it at random, with no repeats inside a single set when you ask for more than one.

The filters let you aim. Contains keeps any dessert with your text in it, so typing cake brings up Caramel Cake, Funnel Cakes, and Jaffa Cake, while typing chocolate or fruit swings the list that way. Starts with looks at the first letter and ends with at the last.

What is on the list

It is a broad shelf of sweets, a couple of hundred of them, leaning toward the classics. You will find baked things like Brownies, Apple Tart, Caramel Cake, and Cream Puffs next to lighter and chillier options, with cookies, pies, and puddings scattered through.

Because it is mixed rather than sorted by type, a random pull can hand you a warm baked dessert one press and something cool the next. Treat it as a shelf to spin for ideas, and use the Contains box when you already know you are in a cake mood, or a chocolate one.

Why there is always room for dessert

It is a real thing, not a figure of speech. You can be full from dinner and still have room for something sweet, and there is a name for why. Appetite researchers call it sensory-specific satiety, a phenomenon named by Barbara Rolls and colleagues. As you eat a lot of one food, that particular food becomes less appealing, but your appetite for different flavours and textures stays fresh. So a plate of savoury dinner can leave you done with savoury while a sweet, cold, or completely different dessert still lands.

That is also why a dessert feels like its own small event rather than just more dinner. Knowing it, there is no need to wait around deliberating, since the craving for something sweet is its own appetite. Let the tool name the dessert and you skip straight to the good part.

Picking from a few

Faced with a fridge or a menu of sweets, a lot of people stall, since more options tend to slow us down rather than help. So pull two or three and decide between those instead. Go by what you are in the mood for first, warm or cold, rich or light, since that one call narrows it fast. Mind the effort too, because a no-bake or shop-bought treat fits a quiet evening better than something that needs an hour in the oven. Then just pick one, because a dessert eaten beats a better one you talked yourself out of.

Questions people ask

Is it free, and does it save anything?

It is free and there is no account. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is kept, so copy a dessert before you leave if you want it.

Can I get a few at once?

Yes. Set the quantity to the number you want, up to 100, and press Generate for that many different desserts in one pull.

Can I narrow it to cakes, or to chocolate?

Type the word into the Contains box and the list trims to desserts that include it, so cake gives you the cakes and chocolate gives you the chocolate ones.

Why do I want dessert even when I am full?

That is sensory-specific satiety, covered in the section above. In short, being full of dinner does not use up your appetite for a different flavour, so a sweet treat still appeals.

References

1. Research on sensory-specific satiety, the appetite effect behind room for dessert, a concept named by Barbara Rolls and colleagues. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4910838/
2. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, "When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, the study behind choice overload. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11138768/