A quick and easy dessert salad, made with fruit, pudding mix, non-dairy topping, chopped pecans, and topped with a pinch of nuts, coconut and Maraschino cherries.

Pineapple Orange Fluff

Okay, seriously. How can you not love a fluff? Easy to throw together. So creamy and delicious!

There are lots of different variations on it these days, but the standard base ingredients usually include some kind of fruit, a complimentary flavor of pudding mix and non-dairy topping (aka Cool Whip) at minimum. I typically like to add mini marshmallows and chopped pecans also.

Three of the most popular versions, and my personal favorites, are pistachio, orange and pineapple, although there are a multitude of variations left only to the imagination! Some recipes these days use pie filling, some sweetened condensed milk, cottage cheese, some use Jello instead of pudding, some use sour cream, some even use flavored coffee creamers or extracts.

Old Fashioned Holiday Fruit Salad with Custard Sauce

Old Fashioned Holiday Fruit Salad with Custard Sauce - a mixed fruit salad, made with canned fruit cocktail, mandarin oranges, grapes, maraschino cherries and fresh apples and finished with an egg custard and fruit juice based dressing - a long-time favorite on many Southern holiday tables.

Holiday Fruit Salad

Fruit salads are popular for holiday meals and there must be thousands of variations, from congealed, to mixed fruit, to frozen. This classic version made from an assortment of fresh and canned fruits and dressed with an egg custard that substitutes juices for the traditional cream sauce, dates back many years and has been a holiday favorite in my family for years.

A simple and classic fruit salad made with mandarin oranges, pineapple chunks, marshmallows, sweetened coconut, maraschino cherries and dressed with sour cream.

Mandarin Orange Fruit Salad

This fruit salad has been around a very long time and is another one of those recipes that falls back to my old Bell's Best cookbooks. Those books and that trusty red Betty Crocker binder is literally where many of us southern gals, and often our mothers, picked up a lot of the familiar recipes you see on your favorite southern sites and food blogs today. They were certainly key cookbooks in my learning experience as a young bride in the 70s.

It's very similar to the Old Fashioned 5 Cup Salad, and, in fact, if you're a fan of the movie The Help, set in the early 1960s, this is the very salad that Sissy Spacek, aka Mrs. Walters, ate while she watched The Guiding Light during the bridge parties - though in the movie she calls this recipe ambrosia, as do some of you.

So funny the part where Skeeter walks through the room, and with her bubbly personality and big ole smile says "Hi Mrs. Walters!" who promptly responds by pointing to the television with her fork and saying only "I'm watching my story." Reminds me so much of my Mama and my Nanny Rosalie. You simply did not interrupt them during their "stories," or if you did, the house, or your hair, better be on fire. Seriously!

Mandarin Orange Cake is what this dessert is typically known as in this part of The Deep South, but in many other areas of The South, this is more commonly known as Pig Pickin' Cake, though it has many names.

Mandarin Orange Pig Pickin' Cake

How y'all liking that vintage Tupperware Cake Taker plate up there?

I know for photo styling I should have used my mama's fancy footed cake plate, but this is one of those refrigerated cakes so in the cake taker it went. This one, in that classic mustard color, dates back to the 70s of course, and has been used many, many times. I actually have two of them - one was mine from back then and the other my mama's, which she very well may have purchased at a Tupperware party at my house!

I also have the rectangular one for sheet cakes. Anybody else still have one of these oldies hanging around?

What do you get what you marry the concepts of Paula Deen's Is it Really Better Than Sex Cake and a Mandarin Orange cake? This delectable treat!

Fresh Citrus Cake

These are the two cakes that stuck out in my mind when I had several pounds of tangerines left that I needed to use and I knew I wanted to use them to make some sort of a cake. So I took the two concepts and created this Fresh Citrus Not Better Than Sex Cake But Pretty Darned Good. Hey, don't look at me ... I didn't name it that originally.

Now first, I used the fresh tangerines because I had them and needed to use them, but absolutely substitute canned mandarin oranges! Keep it easy y'all.

Now, I do have to put in a disclaimer here for my local readers, since I can hear y'all saying "that is not a Better Than Sex Cake Mary."

Yes, I do realize that Paula Deen's "Is it Really Better Than Sex Cake" is nothing like the similar named "Chocolate Sin Lush Cake aka Better than Sex Cake" (that I did not name by the way) we know and love down here in this part of the south. Our "Better Than Sex Cake" always involves chocolate and nuts and cream cheese and Cool Whip and a few other ingredients, none of which are actual "cake."  You can find that delicious layered concoction right here and man oh man is it good.