Round and round it goes

Round and round it goes When Mr. Tidbit heard that Pillsbury's refrigerated crescent-roll dough was available in a "Place 'n Bake" version, he was curious.

In the course of his peculiar career he has unrolled his share of tubes of crescent-roll dough and then rolled it back up again into crescent rolls, so knowing what's involved he didn't expect to find that having his crescents pre-rolled would save enough time to let him take up a hobby. But he was curious to see how the Place 'n Bake crescents would be packaged so that the pre-shaped rolls didn't take up a huge amount of space in the refrigerated-dough case.

Apparently he didn't notice the full name of the product: They're Place 'n Bake Crescent Rounds. That is correct: round crescents! Each is a horizontal spiral of dough, and they come in the regular crescent-roll tube. Mr. Tidbit is (almost) speechless.

But having had his little oxymoronic chuckle (jumbo shrimp, round crescents, Microsoft Works), he is bound to say that if they weren't called "crescents" the flaky-dough rounds might be at least as successful on your table as the oppressive original version from Pillsbury that requires you to unroll the dough and then roll it up.

Amped-up cocoa Mr. Tidbit probably should stop assembling long lists of the many versions of a single brand of a single grocery product that some manufacturer has added to America's cornucopia. So he won't note that Crescent Rounds brings Pillsbury's crescent-roll armada to seven. And he won't even count, much less enumerate, all the cousins of the newest kind of Swiss Miss hot cocoa mix. He'll content himself with saying what it is:

Swiss Miss Pick-Me-Up hot cocoa mix, with 67 milligrams of caffeine per serving, "as much caffeine as a cup of coffee." (That's something like 10 times the usual amount of caffeine in cocoa mix.)

AL SICHERMAN