The apocalypse is not the be-all-and-end-all of what you can predict with a cake oh no. Sigmund Freud would be kicking himself for failing to realise that a cake is also a device to gauge whether a relationship will work or not.

Or so believes photographer Dustin Wayne Harris, who has launched an exhibition in New York’s Heist Gallery, claiming cake crumbs are the new tea leaves.

Having invited his lovers over time to make him a cake, he photographed each one in turn, believing that some essence of themselves were divulged in the baking. "I am convinced I have stumbled on a valuable tool in the arsenal of psychoanalysis: cake reading," he stated. "The process is simple. After a first date with someone, I ask her to bake me a cake. I give no direction, but the way the cake looks never fails to become a metaphor for the relationship. Take Chloe, for example: you can see from her first cake, the relationship had great promise. The second cake tells you that it ended badly"

See: www.heistgallery.com/exhibition/cake-mixx