Paula Deen's Banana Pudding Features This Store-Bought Cookie

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Paula Deen may have disappeared from the small screen for a while following a string of scandals, but there's no denying that she's the queen of homestyle southern cooking. This is a woman, after all, who named a cookbook "Paula Deen's Southern Cooking Bible." Meanwhile, any southern cook worth their salt has a recipe up their sleeve for banana pudding. This sweet, creamy dessert is the epitome of comfort food — and you'll note that it's got some nutritional value when you realize how much potassium one banana contains!

Deen's "Not Yo' Mama's Banana Pudding" contains many of the usual suspects, like cream cheese, boxed vanilla pudding mix, sweetened condensed milk, and, of course, bananas. Its defining feature is that it is topped with Pepperidge Farm Chessmen butter cookies, which add snap and visual interest to the dessert. Sweet Nilla Wafers are probably the standard for southern banana pudding in most households, but we support Deen's choice to top her confection with Chessmen cookies due to the fact that they aren't as cloying (banana pudding already has plenty of sweetness without them). In contrast, the slight savory note of the butter cookie lends a nice balance to the recipe. Chessmen cookies are, of course, also very pretty. Pepperidge Farm even makes special seasonal editions of the cookie, including some that come out around wintertime and are embossed with Christmas trees, making them perfect for festive entertaining!

Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin was a New England homemaker who started experimenting with simple baking recipes due to the fact that her young son had major food allergies. She started with whole wheat bread made from simple, unfussy ingredients. Over time, her delicious loaves drew attention and demand from local supermarkets. On a 1955 sojourn in Europe, Rudkin discovered the delicate, beautiful cookies that Continental bakers specialized in and became inspired, which is how iconic Pepperidge Farm offerings like Milano wafers and Chessmen cookies came to be.

Despite looking fancy, Chessmen cookies are, at heart, just simple butter cookies. If you don't have any Chessmen on hand, yummy butter cookies are only a few ingredients away — and you probably have them all in your pantry and fridge already. You can roll the dough out and either cut it into fancy shapes or stamp it with a cookie press if you'd like to add a similar visual appeal to the Pepperidge Farm original. 

Alternatively, your favorite shortbread cookie recipe will also get the job done, although Chessmen cookies have a bit more sugar in the mix. When you are preparing Paula Deen's banana pudding, you have choices when it comes to the cookie topper, so don't be afraid to consider additional flavorings that might work well with the banana base. Even if you don't want to bake, Chessmen cookies will give it a little special something that makes the sweet treat look as good as it tastes!