  We discuss the issue of toy model building for the dark energy component of
the universe. Specifically, we consider two generic toy models recently
proposed as alternatives to quintessence models, known as Cardassian expansion
and the Chaplygin gas. We show that the former is enteriely equivalent to a
class of quintessence models. We determine the observational constraints on the
latter, coming from recent supernovae results and from the shape of the matter
power spectrum. As expected, these restrict the model to a behaviour that
closely matches that of a standard cosmological constant $\Lambda$.
