Let's Bake Our Way Across the US! Quiz

Fried dough has been a treat of humans for centuries. This version hails from the Latin American and Tex-Mex culinary roots and is found in the Southwestern part of the United States, particularly New Mexico and Arizona. It is a crispy, deep fried pastry made from tortilla dough.

The dough is cut into squares and deep fried in oil until it has small air pockets in it. The sweet variety of the sopapilla is served with honey or syrup and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

The kuchen is a German pastry that translates to "cake". It has a myriad of variations but is a sweet dough that has a fruit or creamy filling. German immigrants in the 1880s settled in the Dakota territories and soon started baking their traditional treat. Kuchen with fruit in it usually features peaches, apples, prunes or raisins and the dessert is topped with streusel or cinnamon sugar.

This dessert, served in the communities with coffee as "kaffee and kuchen", became so popular that it is now the official state dessert of South Dakota.

King Cake is a dessert that is served starting at the start of Carnival season (January 6) in New Orleans and can be found through Ash Wednesday. It is a blend of coffee cake and cinnamon roll and iced in yellow, green, and purple. It is often filled with fruit or sweet cream cheese.

The name is derived from the Biblical story of three kings who brought gifts to Baby Jesus. From this, a fun tradition was born where a small plastic baby is hidden in the cake. Whoever finds it must either bring the next cake or throw a party to continue the good times.

This dessert is a graham cracker crust filled with a custard and copped with meringue. The custard is flavored with the juice from key limes. These fruits are smaller than Persian limes and have more seeds and a thin rind. The pie originated in Key West, an island off of southern Florida in the late 1880s.

It is said that one of the main ingredients of the pie, condensed milk, came into the recipe because fresh milk was hard to find geographically in the area at the time. It has become so popular that this baked good is now the state of Florida's official pie!

Smith Island, in Maryland, was settled in the 1600s and is still the only inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay. Starting in the 1800s, women on the island began baking cakes and sending them with their husbands during oyster harvest time. The cakes symbolized togetherness and serve as a reminder of the loved ones at home.

They have been made in the area ever since those days. The cake has eight to ten layers which are very thin and stacked high. The traditional flavoring is a yellow cake with a chocolate fudge frosting that is found on top of the cake and between each layer.

It is the official dessert of Maryland.

Nevada has one of the largest Basque populations in the United States due to the fact that this European ethnic group emigrated there in the late 1800s. When the mining boom started, the Basque settlers found they could earn a good living selling wool and meat to the area and raised their sheep in the countryside.

They also began introducing the area to their delicious baked Basque cake. Originally called gateau Basque, this is a round tart filled with pastry cream or cherry jam or brandy-soaked cherries.

It is then topped with a traditional cross-hatch pattern for easy recognition of this wonderful baked good.

Blueberry plants grow all around Maine because their hardiness allows them to last through the hard winters and rough soil. Over 95% of the nation's low bush blueberries are harvested in Maine and have become a huge export of the state. They are harvested from July to September and are the main ingredient in the official state dessert of the blueberry pie.

A pie crust is filled with a fresh blueberry filling and topped with a lattice work crust. It is often served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

The Meyer lemon tree originally came from China and tastes like a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. It was brought over and cultivated in America, primarily in California, in early 1900s. The crops survived a virus in the 1960s and a newer and improved lemon emerged.

The lemons go into many different recipes and are especially highlighted in the Meyer Lemon cake. It is traditionally made as a simple and buttery sponge cake baked in a loaf shape. It is then drizzled with a sugar and lemon glaze made with juice from the Meyer lemons. Lemon curd can also be dolloped on top of the delicious cake.

A buckeye in nature is a shiny, dark brown nut with a light tan patch that grows on a tree. They were thought to be good luck and were called "buckeyes" because they resemble the eye of a deer. They grow in Ohio and also represent the nickname of the Ohio State teams.

The citizens of the state began making a dessert called a buckeye in the 1960s. It is a peanut butter mixture (either smooth or chunky) dipped into a fudgy covering. However, a circular portion of the dessert is left uncovered to make it look like the local tree nut. Whether called a cookie or candy, these bite-sized treats are easy and delicious.

This pie started as a crust-less molasses cake baked by the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch in the Mid-Atlantic area of the United States. It is a variation of a syrup (treacle) tart from Europe. It was embraced by the Amish as it could made with a frugal budget and had a long shelf life.

It got its unique name because it used to sit out and cool after baking and when insects would gather around it, the baker would yell "Shoo, fly!". It is a pie shell filled with a sugar and molasses mixture and topped with brown sugar and cinnamon crumbles.

There is also a "dry bottom" version of the pie that is similar to a cake.