It was a fine way for five women to spend the Fourth of July, lolling around a backyard pool and pondering how many calories per hour lolling expends. Whether lolling while hanging onto a float, legs cool in the water, or stretching out in the sun on said float burns more calories was briefly debated until the margaritas were ready.

As is usually the case when this group gets together, thoughts quickly turned to food. Taking a break from our strenuous lolling, we filled red-white-and-blue plates with peach crisp, tomato or roast beef sandwiches, potato salad, and salsa and chips. A pretty bowl of grapes and cherries was ready for nibbling.

It's not by accident that I list the dessert first. As we ate, one of the group told the story of a dessert so weird, so gooey and so mind-boggling that I actually reached for a non-sugarcoated grape.

A co-worker took it to an office picnic, she said, and everyone was still talking about it days later. It was a frozen cake made from ice cream sandwiches, whipped topping and crushed candy bars.

Now, I love a good dessert, and it doesn't have to be high-class creme brulee to make me happy. But this -- I was having a hard time even imagining what it would taste like.

In response to popular demand, the co-worker e-mailed the recipe to the entire office, and my pool pal forwarded it to me.

"Prepare to feel your arteries clog just by reading this," she wrote, adding that her sister knew someone in Knoxville, Tenn., who makes it and that another friend in Pennsylvania has tried it. "But she had it without the Butterfingers. She plans to remedy that soon."

It's called Butterfingers Ice Cream Sandwich Cake. The recipe says to place 9 1/2 ice cream sandwiches in the bottom of a 9- by 13-inch baking dish. Yes, you unwrap them first. Then spread half of a 16-ounce container of whipped topping over the sandwiches and top with three crushed Butterfingers bars. Repeat the layers, using a total of 19 ice cream sandwiches, six Butterfingers bars and the whole container of whipped topping.

"You can use light topping, if you want to reduce a few calories," the recipe says.

Oh, yeah. That'll make a big difference.

The whole thing goes into the freezer for several hours, until it's firmly frozen. It's served cold; gym membership on the side, optional.

A little online research revealed that I am definitely behind the curve on ice cream sandwich-based desserts. I found dozens of variations, some going back to 2001, using different numbers of sandwiches and amounts of whipped topping.

Some recipes use M&Ms, toffee chips or chocolate chips instead of Butterfingers. Many add chocolate syrup and caramel sauce to the top or between the layers. Others include salted peanuts, or layer in more ice cream along with the whipped topping, or use real whipped cream instead.

One recipe, from the Dairy Council of Nebraska, heats chocolate syrup and peanut butter together and pours it over the whipped cream layer, then adds crushed peanut-butter cup candy; repeat.

This kind of dessert both repels and fascinates -- with fascination winning out, judging from its popularity. As you trim off just a little slice from the tower of frozen goodness, you think that it has everything you really shouldn't touch with a 10-foot Weight Watchers menu. And it's so easy to make -- unwrap, open, spread. You can keep all the ingredients on hand all the time, telling yourself they're for the kids. Uh-huh.

The cake is a mound of glorious excess. And no matter how hard we try to fight it with 100-calorie bags of cookies and fresh nectarines, we all love excess, like the deep-fried Oreos or Twinkies at the State Fair that never go out of style.

I asked my registered dietitian friend Suzanne Havala Hobbs in Chapel Hill what she thought about the appeal of an ice cream sandwich cake. She replied: "My best guess is that people are entertained by the decadence of the whole thing, and it tastes good. The flavors may be all melded together, but the overall impression is still 'creamy and sweet and good.' The ingredients separately are all favorite comfort foods, so people may also just expect them to taste good mixed together, too."

When I was a kid, most ice cream parlors offered a menu item that consisted of a scoop of every kind of ice cream they sold, plus every topping, plus whipped cream and several Maraschino cherries, all served in a punch bowl. True, this was before the days of 30 flavors, but that was still a lot of ice cream.

The names for this concoction varied -- Hurricane, Volcano, Pig Trough. I remember seeing the bowl go by to a table full of teenagers. Everyone in the place leaned from their booths to watch, envious and appalled at the same time.

Today, in my fourth decade, I'm supposed to be satisfied with just a bit of the best, a small scoop of homemade mango sorbet or a thin slice of chocolate torte every now and then.

But there's still something about the thought of a big stack of ice cream sandwiches, chocolate sauce and whipped cream that makes my inner child demand to be fed. A short stack, perhaps? After all, I have done a lot of lolling recently.