5 Southern Desserts You Need to Try

Red velvet cake, peach cobbler and pecan pie are classics that you should be familiar with, but the South has birthed many desserts that are just as delicious and much less well-known. Here, F&W Test Kitchen pro Ben Mims, author of the newly released, Sweet & Southern: Classic Desserts with a Twist, shares five of his favorites. 

Hummingbird Cake

Thanks to its charming and delightful name, this now-classic Southern layer cake became an instant hit across the South when it was published in 1978 in Southern Living magazine. The cake essentially consists of banana bread–type cake layers and cream cheese frosting, which struck a chord with Southern women knee-deep in the carrot cake trend of that time. And like carrot cake, hummingbird cake is an oil-based cake, so it requires no creaming of butter and sugar and is as easy as making muffins—no wonder its popularity spread like wildfire there. As for the name, no one quite knows for sure, but my favorite version is that that hummingbirds would flock to it to get at its floral, over-the-top sweetness.

Recipe: Hummingbird Cake

Peanut Butter Pie

Growing up in Mississippi, my mom made this pie—an odd concoction of peanut butter and confectioners’ sugar crumbles and vanilla pudding in a vanilla wafer crust—virtually every week during the summer. Served ice-cold and with its crowd–pleasing flavor profile, it was the perfect ending to a barbecue or outdoor picnic in the sweltering Southern heat. Our friends and family did—and still to this day—gasp when they eat it. When I set out to make my own, I amped up the peanut butter flavor and swapped the wafer crust for apâte brisée. It makes for a slightly more sophisticated pie, but one that still elicits wide eyes and even wider smiles from those who eat it.

Recipe: Peanut Butter Pie

Orange Breakfast Rolls

There’s not much you can do to a cinnamon roll to improve upon it, except take it in the most unexpected direction and see what magic comes out. That’s the best way to describe these orange breakfast rolls. Many Southerners first got their taste of these treats—a sweet, yeast-risen dough filled with orange zest, butter and brown sugar, baked and then glazed with an orange icing—from Sister Schubert’s, a convenience brand of freezer rolls. Made homemade, however, you can bypass the sometimes one-note sweetness and go straight to the bold and bright orange flavor that will have you wondering how you ever settled for just cinnamon and sugar.

Recipe: Orange Breakfast Rolls

Ambrosia Pavlova

Hilariously known to Southerners as a “salad,” ambrosia has always been kind of an inside joke. Equal parts orange slices and shredded coconut, sometimes mixed with cherries or pineapple and even marshmallows, the inclusion of pecans or pistachios always transformed this obvious dessert mélange into a slightly savory–sweet side dish for picnics and ladies’ luncheons. For my riff, I played with ambrosia’s unabashed sweetness and swapped a crunchy homemade meringue for the marshmallows, and piled on fresh citrus and coconut with a tart pineapple curd for a Pavlova dessert more tropical than deli tray and befitting this addictive, if often misunderstood, beauty.

Recipe: Ambrosia Pavlova

Chess Squares

Though many in America know about chess pie, that classic and simple egg custard wonder, not many know of her cousin the chess square, a virtually all-together different confection. Still possessing the creamy, custardy lusciousness of the pie, chess squares get their addictive quality from a cream cheese custard baked over top a buttery–soft cake crust; I like to think of them as the original Crack Pie. If you happen upon an autumn tailgate at a Southern university, you’ll find these treats at the center of a mob, as they’re the essential dessert before kickoff.

Recipe: Chess Squares

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