https://www.eater.com/2015/1/26/7860903/amanda-cohen-royal-c...

It wasn't just an omelette on top of a waffle (and both of them the size of a medium pizza). As you strayed from the edges toward the center it became difficult to see where the waffle ended and the omelette began.

Such a shame they went out of business.

This cracked me up, because I had a fantastic dream the other night where I had a tour through a donut factory. But the best thing I had (in the dream) was something I'd never tried before, never seen, and which I intend to make at the earliest opportunity. It was slightly salty french fries, buttered and coated in sugar and cinnamon, like cinnamon toast. Bang on. Makes a lot of sense too, if you think about it. Definitely would fit in the "dark breakfast" polygon.

[edit] the potato and bacon theory also comes from what ends up deliciously mixed on your plate at the end, which along with syrup and ketchup is also an integral part of any egg/flour/milk breakfast.

It is difficult to put milk into food. Why not just drink it? Alternatively, can we drink eggs and flour?

Cheese is another variation for milk. What about grilled cheese and eggs? Or some variation on Mac and Cheese?

You can also consider other dimensions like vegetables and spices. According to this plane, shakshuka is pure egg. Add spices to milk and you have chai. Add eggs to chai and you have cursed eggnog.

My crepe recipe - cook on medium heat pan:

Blend on low: 4 eggs- 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 stick of melted butter, and 1/4cup to 1/2 cup plain flower, 1 heaped tbsp of baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, vanilla optional and to taste

- 1/4 c. milk

- 1/2 c. flour

- 4 eggs

- 1/3 c. sugar

- some salt

- cinnamon

- cloves

- nutmeg

- poppyseeds

Did the first two cakes without baking powder, turned into something between a crepe and a tortilla. Did the last two cakes with baking powder and they were just a very squishy pancake.

Breakfast burritos are also at least as important as quiche (as in, neither are as tasty without addins - just like omelettes).

My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!

Fancy projection math is only for after coffee!

https://cuberule.com/

WHERE ARE THE BISCUITS???

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_sandwich#Fried_egg_sandwic...

3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup flour. Makes a nice flan/pudding consistency. Eggy and delicious.

Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing.

Does that make them better in any way? Or strictly worse, but cheaper?

Edit: looked it up and apparently they still use 3 eggs but the batter makes it super fluffy (like 2x) so the omelette looks enormous.

- croissants - muesli/porridge/oatmeal - cookies - toasts - bread & butter (nutella too)

There's also no mention of the fourth leg of the breakfast triad: maple syrup.

One important property of pudding is that unlike pancakes, the space of pudding isn't "chaotic and fractal" because whether you add just enough flour to make it somewhat sticky or so much that you can cut it with a knife, it's still pudding. This means that if we take flour-heavy pudding and somehow add shitload of eggs, we should be able to venture into the Dark Breakfast area. I have a pudding recipe that calls for egg yolks, but I feel like this isn't a good lead. Still it proves further how flexible "pudding" is.

Going back to pancakes, there's one funny variation. "Naleśniki" with cottage cheese and cream (or yoghurt). Cottage cheese and cream are basically milk with extra steps, which means that the entire dish becomes mainly milk. This means that the Pancake Local Group actually stretches much closer to the "milk" vertex than your diagram suggests.

If I were to prepare something that passes as food and sits in the Dark Breakfast Abyss, I'd try scrambled eggs on the thinnest bread I could reasonably make. Something like "scrambled eggs taco".

How about doughnut with just the right amount of custard filling? Or perhaps a brioche with the right amount of French vanilla ice cream/gelato? A classic egg and cheese sandwich in your desired proportions?

And I feel like that’s really a missed opportunity? Like even recognizing that of all meals breakfast is the most “comforting” and the one most likely for customers to want familiar, at the same time there are so many unexplored variants using the same ingredients (as this article shows!) that almost no restaurants will ever experiment with or offer. Lunch and dinner menus have massive variation in comparison!

The Breakfast Simplex is a space of recipes parameterized by {egg, milk, flour} ratios, normalized onto a simplex. Add butter or sugar and the dimension increases. Add prep method and you create adjacent regions. A breakfast buffet is a larger, possibly disconnected simplicial complex spanning multiple ingredient families.

That structure is exactly what Tom Ngo formalized and patented in Embedded Constraint Graphics in 1996 at Interval Research Corporation. I wrote about it when the patent expired in 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12572696

US Patent #5933150: System for image manipulation and animation using embedded constraint graphics

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5933150

When I asked Tom about applying ECG to other applications after the patent expired, he wrote:

>I am, of course, partial to the idea that gluing high-dimensional simplices at their edges and faces is an extremely general way to represent blending manifolds, in the same way that gluing polygons together has done us so much good in the 3D modeling space. I also think the >2 decades of progress since ECG have put us in a better position to do something really cool based on direct manipulation.

Golan Levin, Malcolm Slaney, and Tom Ngo used the ECG graphical editor to build the vector face cartoons for Mouther, simply by dragging eyes, mouths, and features directly on the drawing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180717222910/http://www.flong....

ECG defines example states at vertices. Compatible examples span simplices. The full state space is a simplicial complex. Interior points are barycentric blends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicial_complex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinate_system

When you drag something in screen space, the system maps that motion into the n-dimensional interpolation space and solves for blend weights via the Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse of the Jacobian matrix, the same linear algebra used in inverse kinematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%E2%80%93Penrose_inverse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_matrix_and_determinan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics

You don’t indirectly adjust abstract sliders. You directly manipulate concrete outcomes. The solver recovers coordinates.

The same formulation applies to interpolating vector drawings, mesh blending, facial animation, pose spaces, and other example-based interfaces where states are meaningful and compatibility matters.

The same geometric intuition appears in large language models. Tokens and concepts are represented as high-dimensional vectors, and model activations are computed through weighted linear combinations in embedding space. Interpolating between embeddings corresponds to moving through that vector space via weighted blends, just in many more dimensions. ECG makes the simplices explicit and topologically structured, while LLM representations are implicit and learned. In both cases, behavior emerges from interpolation in high-dimensional spaces.

Apple’s ARKit already exposes facial expression as a set of named blend shape coefficients via ARFaceAnchor — values like mouthSmileLeft, jawOpen, and eyeBlinkRight driving a 3D face mesh in real time. Bring Mouther into 3D and you can drag the mouth corners upward to interpolate toward smiling targets, mapping that motion through the same barycentric machinery into blend weights instead of hard-coded sliders. This would make a great Blender plug-in for directly manipulating facial animation, to use with FaceIt!

Faceit : Facial Expressions And Performance Capture

https://superhivemarket.com/products/faceit

Breakfast is a concrete instance. Pancake, crepe, and omelette define a simplex over ingredient ratios. Drag toward eggs and the egg weight increases. Drag toward milk and you move along that axis. Cross the egg-milk edge shared by the crepe simplex {flour, egg, milk} and the custard simplex {egg, milk, sugar}, and you move from thin batters into sweet custards without leaving the manifold. The Dark Breakfast region is simply an unoccupied part of a valid simplex -- suggesting adjacent, unexplored Dark Custard subspaces rather than forbidden states.

Simplicial complexes are useful UI primitives. They provide local linear interpolation inside zones and explicit global topology across zones. They scale to higher dimensions, while maintaining a user friendly 2D direct manipulation user interface. They encode constraints structurally instead of procedurally.

A pie menu can be viewed as a radial parameterization of a simplex. A direct-manipulation pie menu over ingredient space lets you drag in the direction of the crusts and fillings you want, with barycentric weights accumulating as you move.

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus (Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Also, while I know that omelette is technically the whipping of large amounts of air into what is otherwise scrambled eggs, it feels wrong to me that "omelette" is categorized as "pure egg singularity". Is an omelette worth the time and effort over scrambled eggs if it does not include bits of vegetables, meat, and/or cheese folded inside like a taco?

It’s a baked custard (so plenty of eggs) in a pie.

not sure the proportions match.

Breakfast has way more dimensions.

I also get up early and it is often actually dark.