North American desserts

North American dessert — American and Canadian — runs deep in a few specific traditions: the great pie canon (apple, pecan, key lime, pumpkin, shoofly), the layered cake (red velvet, devil's food, hummingbird, Lady Baltimore), the regional ice cream traditions (frozen custard in the Midwest, soft-serve along the East Coast, rocky road on the West Coast), and the cookie (chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, oatmeal raisin).

The continent's dessert geography is also marked by immigrant contributions: doughnuts from the Dutch (and the Polish pączki community of Hamtramck and Detroit), butter tarts and Nanaimo bars from Canada's French-British inheritance, beignets and king cake from French Louisiana, the German-Pennsylvania shoofly pie and funny cake, the Jewish-American black-and-white cookie and rugelach.

The pantry is butter-and-sugar generous and unusually heavy on maple syrup, pecans, cranberries, blueberries, peanut butter, and cream cheese — ingredients that bear the mark of the continent's own larder.