It’s harder for folks to find things to talk about since the pandemic curtailed social gatherings, sports events, travel and other normal activities.
When we were waiting for everybody to get on one of those awful Zoom calls this week, somebody suggested that we list our top 10 favorite movies and email each other the results.
Who would have thought we would ever resort to top 10 lists to have something to chat about? But these requests for people to rank their top 10 favorite cities, songs, sports stars and all that keep popping up everywhere.
There was a suggestion on a social media group recently for members to list their top 10 favorite desserts. I tried it but never could get my list below a hundred.
Sweets have become my favorite food. I used to think Jack Clayton, our football coach at Northwestern, was strange when he offered to swap his steak, chicken or some other main dish for my dessert. I understand now.
So I decided to rank just the top 10 desserts my mother made and not include all the other great sweet treats I enjoy. Here are the results from bottom to top:
- Pineapple upside down cake. She made it in a black skillet with a lot of butter and brown sugar. There were cherries in the pineapple rings on top, and I ate those first. We should have made pictures when she flipped it out of the skillet onto a cake plate.
- Banana pudding. My dad and I didn’t like meringue, so she covered the mixture of bananas, pudding and vanilla wafers with homemade whipped cream. She usually made it for church dinners.
- Chocolate chip cookies. Her recipe made enough to last all week even when I took some in my school lunch every day. I never decided if they were better with walnuts or pecans, but nothing ever went better with milk.
- Peach cobbler. Or really any kind of cobbler. She made it with apples, blackberries, strawberries and other fruits. They came out of the oven just as we finished supper, and we cooled the hot, crisp crust down with vanilla ice cream.
- Chocolate pie. All of us gathered in the kitchen when we heard the whisk and smelled the cocoa mixture cooking. She let us scrape the leftover chocolate filling from the pan. I still make the pies today with her recipe, and the grandkids love it.
- Brownies. They were made from scratch and filled with pecans. She made an icing with cocoa, powdered sugar, vanilla and milk, and poured it on the brownies when they were hot. We had them every time my Uncle Buddy visited.
- Pecan pie. The first day my dad took us to gather pecans every year, she made a pie with pecan halves that put a crunchy top on the thick, syrupy filling. Family and friends considered it her best dessert, and we had the pies for Christmas and Thanksgiving.
- Homemade ice cream. On a lot of hot summer days, she would send my dad to the icehouse for crushed ice while she fixed the ice cream mixture. She added fresh figs or peaches when we had them, and we took turns cranking the wooden ice cream freezer.
- White cake with cherry filling. There were three layers of cake with cherry filling and icing between them. The icing on top turned firm and crispy instead of creamy. She made it for my birthdays for years, and Regina still does.
- Divinity candy. There is an art to making this fluffy white candy with corn syrup, egg whites, sugar and other ingredients that have to be cooked to perfection, and she mastered it.
She made big batches of it for us every Christmas with black walnuts or hickory nuts and shared it with friends and neighbors. As many times as she tried to teach me to make it, I never could.
It will always be first on my top 10 list of favorite sweets.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES