Soft and chewy oatmeal cookies with coconut and pecans.

Coconut Pecan Oatmeal Cookies

I'm not much of a baker. Never have been, and that's perfectly okay because there are plenty of bakeries around town that have very talented people making gorgeous and tasty creations that I can't, and frankly worth every penny spent.

Just like any other gal though, I do enjoy desserts occasionally though, and of them all, freshly baked cookies are right at the top of the list.

Tender, homemade coconut cake made easy in a sheet cake, finished with a 7-minute, divinity icing, shredded coconut and here, with a sugared cranberry and mint leaf garnish. 

Homemade Coconut Sheet Cake with Divinity Icing

I love a coconut layer cake during the holidays. It's a beautiful presentation on a holiday dessert table, covered in a perfect divinity icing and dusted all over with fluffy, white coconut. I just looks like heaven on a cake stand!

Unfortunately, while I think I'm a fairly decent cook overall, I am definitely not a baker, and though I can pull off a pretty good pan of brownies, cookies even, or a snack cake, well... layer cakes aren't my forte.

A classic, cold salad made from carrots, raisins and pineapple, sometimes coconut and peanuts, and dressed with a sweetened mayonnaise.

Classic Carrot Raisin Salad

We are still in the process of moving out of our old home, while the new house is looking more and more like we have lived here for 20 years! And the garage, oh you don't even want to know what that looks like, but as I have the energy, I bring in a box and go through it.

We are moving all of the Christmas stuff, the china from the china cabinet and have a freezer and a few pieces of furniture to go and we'll be finished... finally. The Cajun and I were so tired and hungry yesterday afternoon that we stopped by Hartz's Fried Chicken and treated ourselves to their buffet for an early supper.

Santa Claus Whiskers Cookies - a slice and bake butter cookie, filled with chopped candied cherries and pecans, and rolled in coconut before baking.

Santa Claus Whiskers Cookies

I have the tried and true favorites that I like to make every Christmas, but sometimes I like to add something new to the cookie tray and this was one that I kept running into when browsing my cookbook collection. It's a slice and bake log cookie, so it needs an overnight rest once you roll it up, but it comes together easy enough.

A slight crunch on the outside and chewy on the inside, these light and airy cookies are made with coconut, sugar, flour and beaten egg whites.

Coconut Macaroons

Coconut Macaroons are another fabulous and super easy cookie to add to your Christmas sweets tray, but don't confuse them with French macarons, which, although meringue based, are sandwiched with some kind of a filling and a whole 'nother kinda cookie.

Coconut Orange Marmalade Bread - a lightly sweetened, quick bread, made with orange marmalade and coconut, infused both in the bread batter as well as to glaze the top.

Coconut Orange Marmalade Bread

Folks sometimes show up on my site here wondering where all of the wonderful desserts are that are often associated with the South, and that are usually found in abundance on the pages of many of the other Southern bloggers out there. I do admit, a post of sweets certainly draws a lot more attention and shares on Facebook for sure! Folks sure do love their sweets.

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!

Old Fashioned Martha Washington Candy

Another old fashioned heritage confection, Martha Washington Candy is a rich mixture of buttery coconut and condensed milk with pecans, rolled into a tight ball and dipped in chocolate.

Martha Washington Candy

These little scrumptious bite-sized confections have been a beloved Christmas favorite in families for years, often passed down for generations. People remember their mothers making them, and their grandmothers before them.

I don't know how they officially got their name, except perhaps for their namesake, who I've read was quite a good cook. Maybe they came from her own recipe collection - that's one cookbook I don't happen to own!

Original Magic Bars with Variations

No matter how you layer them, these classic Magic Cookie Bars are addictive. Most often they are layered with a graham cracker crust, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips, and sometimes butterscotch, or even a combination of them, coconut and nuts.

Original Magic Bar

If you Google looking for 7 Layer Bar recipes, most of what you will find are bars listing these five basic layers - though many do also add another layer of butterscotch chips - yet they all seem to count the graham crackers and butter as individual layers.

Some recipes do melt the butter, and then simply pour the graham crackers on top, rather than mixing and pressing them in, so I guess that's one way to consider them separate layers.

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.

Coconut Key Lime Pie with Minty Whipped Cream

A Key lime pie made with cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk and Key lime juice in a coconut graham cracker crust and served with minty whipped cream.

Coconut Key Lime Pie

Coconut Key Lime Pie.

I love lime. I absolutely love it. Pair that up with some sweetened condensed milk and I am in heaven.

Traditionally Key lime pie contains egg yolks and is unbaked, though that is rarely done these days, since most fillings with egg are now baked.

Some say that baking the pie completely changes its flavor and texture though and use pasteurized egg yolks to squelch the fears of using raw eggs in an unbaked filling. Key lime pie also sometimes has an egg white meringue on top, though I prefer mine plain with only a dab of whipped cream.

Fresh, extra large shrimp, coated in flour, dipped in an egg wash, then rolled in coconut and fried.

Coconut Shrimp

Coconut shrimp are a favorite down here along the Gulf Coast and these are delicious and not at all hard. The hardest part is dealing with pieces of coconut that come off and then burn in the oil.

The shrimp that I used were extra large ones The Cajun pulled up on the last shrimping trip, so just about 4 or 5 made for a real nice serving and didn't result in much residue of coconut falling off. If you are cooking smaller shrimp, or a larger batch overall, you may find you'll need to strain or change out your oil. That's just the downside of doing coconut shrimp, but I gotta say it really is worth the effort.

Chocolate cake mix with marshmallows, sweetened coconut, sliced almonds, butter, chocolate chips make Almond Joy Cake, a fabulous and well loved candy bar cake.

Almond Joy Cake

Almond Joy Cake is one of the most popular of the doctored up cake mix cakes and it's no wonder really. Chocolate cake, topped with a layer of gooey marshmallow and coconut cream, that is topped with a creamy layer of chocolate and almonds, and more crunchy almonds on top - it's really rich and decadent I promise ya.