Hearty Pies

• Along with being one-crust desserts, sweet potato, pecan and chess pies share the virtue of using ingredients that are plentiful and readily available in the South. Sweet potato pie somewhat resembles pumpkin pie, and is made by combining cooked sweet potatoes, eggs, milk and spices. Another traditional dessert, pecan pie takes advantage of one of the South's most plentiful nuts by suspending them in a gooey nest often made of corn syrup, butter and eggs. Chess pie is a simple sweet buttermilk custard pie, made flavorful with vanilla and lemon.

Sweet Cakes

• For decades red velvet cake was mostly known as a Southern and soul food dessert. The classic layer cake is made special by the rich color achieved with red food coloring and cocoa, as well as either a cream cheese frosting or a whipped white frosting. Pound cake is a buttery tea cake that soul food cooks prize for its versatility -- it can be dressed up with a number of sauces, including fruit syrups and preserves. Carrot cake is baked as a sheet cake and topped with cream cheese frosting. This traditional holiday dessert relies on simple foods like grated carrots and pecans.

Crusty Cobblers

• Cobblers always have a place at the soul food table. Their bases are much like fruit pies, but don't rely on knowing how to make a flawless pie crust. Instead, the filling is poured into a square or rectangular baking dish and cooked under a biscuitlike topping. Most soul food cobblers don't mix fruits, but instead focus on one fruit. Among the traditional soul food cobblers are peach cobbler, blueberry cobbler and blackberry cobbler.

Additional Favorites

• Bread pudding is a useful base for the sweets on hand, whether it's bananas or apples and raisins. A more recent pudding to appear on the soul food dessert buffet, banana pudding falls into the category of not-quite-from-scratch. The recipe combines sliced bananas with instant vanilla pudding and vanilla wafer cookies. Peanut brittle utilizes another staple of the South, the peanut, and turns it into candy cooked in sheets and broken into irregular pieces. Pralines are similar, but made with pecans and dropped by spoonfuls to cool into disc-shaped sweet treats.