10 Nostalgic Desserts Every ’80s Kid Remembers

The desserts ’80s kids remember eating may not have been fancy and Instagram-worthy, but they were fun and flavorful. They were also easy to make. While it was possible to make some of them the long way, the name of the game was simplicity.

Some nostalgic ’80s desserts came prepackaged and ready to eat, while others required putting boxed mixes or processed foods together without a lot of work involved. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of stay-at-home moms decreased from 49% in 1967 to 23% by 1999. So, with more mothers joining the workforce every year, it makes sense that fewer were making their desserts from scratch as often. The recipes often combine fruit, nuts, pre-made crusts, and other no-bake or from-a-mix components. Interestingly, quite a lot of the desserts on our list rely on Jell-O brand gelatin and pudding mixes as well as Cool Whip. Perhaps some moms were still spending six hours laboring over a Julia Child dessert, but the desserts most ’80s kids remember were the fun ones made with far less effort. We felt no less loved for it, enjoying these easier desserts perhaps even more.

Made the fast way with processed ingredients, these are all absolute junk food, but they’re still all delicious. So, get ready for a trip down memory lane with these 10 desserts ’80s kids loved, and decide which one you want to make for yourself or for your kids to rediscover.

The 1980s Jell-O poke cake was a winner with ’80s kids because it was both fun to make with an adult and flavorful. The poke cake seems to have originated in a 1981 Jell-O advertisement in Bon Appetit. The ad featured a two-layer moist and fruity rainbow cake, with a red and green version showing up in the Christmas issue ad that year.

It wasn’t long before people were calling these cakes “poke cakes” and serving them as single-layer sheet cakes rather than making multi-flavored layers. The dessert starts with a box cake mix. Then, you poke holes in the cake and pour liquid Jell-O over the top to flavor the cake. So, you could have a strawberry, cherry, orange, or even a lime cake if you want. You refrigerate it to set it, but the Jell-O simply makes the cake moist instead of giving it a congealed texture. It’s usually served with Cool Whip on top, but actual whipped cream can work, too. Although, we dare say that many ’80s kids had never tasted real whipped cream, with the chemical wonder that was Cool Whip being so popular. Besides, the same company that owns Jell-O owns Cool Whip (Kraft Heinz). So, it’s not surprising that Cool Whip was the topping of choice here.

Modern versions of poke cake sometimes omit Jell-O in favor of fruit syrups. However, Jell-O was still king in the 1980s.

Not every dessert that ’80s kids remember was invented in the 1980s, including ambrosia salad. However, if you were at a potluck or holiday meal, this one was fairly likely to be there. And how could a kid resist it once they’d fallen in love with Greek mythology and learned that consuming ambrosia was the secret to Greek gods’ immortality?

The earliest versions of ambrosia started showing up in the 1800s, but they were very different since they simply layered orange slices and coconut with sugar. Up until then, citrus had been harder to find in grocery stores, and the dessert was able to evolve as more ingredients became more easily available. By the 1980s, the orange slices (often canned Mandarin oranges) and shredded coconut in the original recipe were joined by ingredients like pineapple, mini marshmallows, maraschino cherries, and nuts. Plus, ambrosia salad recipes had changed to become a creamy dessert, containing sour cream and a whipped topping like Cool Whip. While it looked like a mess, it was delicious, with pastel-colored marshmallows and bright red maraschino cherries tempting everyone to try it.

There was another spinoff salad called Watergate salad from the 1970s that sometimes showed up at potlucks instead during the 1980s. In fact, sometimes it was called ambrosia Watergate salad. Instead of sour cream, it contained pistachio Jell-O, which turned the dessert green and changed the flavor profile. So, if you were remembering ambrosia as green, you’re not technically wrong.

Banana pudding is another dessert that you couldn’t avoid at potlucks in the 1980s, especially if you lived in the South. While its origins were a hundred years earlier, it seems to have hit the height of its popularity in the 1980s. It’s also another recipe that came to rely on a Jell-O product: instant pudding. The only other ingredients necessary during the ’80s were freshly sliced bananas, vanilla wafers, and Cool Whip.

Granted, when the recipe appeared a century earlier in the late 1880s in Good Housekeeping, it looked more like a trifle, with layers of custard, bananas, sponge cake, and whipped cream. Later versions had a meringue top, but it wasn’t until around 1920 that a recipe came out including vanilla wafers instead of sponge cake. By the 1940s, you could find the recipe for banana pudding on boxes of Nabisco Nilla Wafers. By the 1980s, instant Jell-O pudding had long replaced homemade custard, and Cool Whip had replaced homemade whipped cream.

With the recipe for a banana pudding being so simple, it was something moms or even kids could make for a dessert or potluck in mere minutes. Plus, there was no cooking necessary if you used instant pudding, which meant you didn’t have to heat up the kitchen to make it like a lot of other desserts. So, that certainly helped make it popular for summer gatherings.

With a name like monkey bread, you don’t have to know a single thing about this dessert to imagine that it would be something children of the 1980s would be excited to eat. It was just as fun as the name suggests, being a sweet, buttery, and gooey pull-apart bread that turned dessert into a messy hands-on experience. It was one dessert where kids were given permission to be messy, not unlike little monkeys.

Monkey bread had its origin a century earlier in 1880s Hungary, where it was called aranygaluska. It came to the U.S. via Hungarian immigrants and made the rounds in Hollywood starting in the 1940s. First Lady Nancy Reagan popularized this dish in the 1980s when she released her recipe for it. While the dessert started as buttery caramelized pull-apart sweet dough balls, it evolved to have other flavors and ingredients, like cinnamon, pecans, and bourbon.

Boxed mixes for monkey bread seemed to come about later, but it was still an accessible dessert for busy ’80s moms to make if they turned to canned refrigerated biscuit dough to make it rather than making yeast dough from scratch like Reagan’s recipe required. Some cooks have found an even better shortcut by turning canned cinnamon rolls into monkey bread.

The first time you had dirt cake as a child of the 1980s was unforgettable. It was hard to believe that this whimsical confection even existed and that it was edible since it resembled a dish of mud and rich dirt. While you might have been slightly dubious about something called dirt cake, seeing the gummy worms coming out of thick chocolate pudding mud and chocolate cookie dirt were all the hints a kid needed to know it was going to be delicious.

It’s possible that the dirt cake was inspired by Mississippi mud pie, which arrived on the scene in the 1960s and was also popular in the 1980s. Like dirt cake, it contained both mud and dirt layers. After a recipe for Kansas dirt cake appeared in a newspaper article in 1988, it became an instant hit. The bottom chocolate pudding mud layer was enriched and thickened with cream cheese, margarine, confectioner’s sugar, and Cool Whip, while the top dirt layer was made with crushed Oreo cookies. It wasn’t long before people were adding gummy worms to the dessert.

Some of us first had it served to us in terra cotta pots, with the adults in our lives sometimes eating it straight out of the pot with trowels without letting us in on the secret that it was a dessert. Some people up the game by adding edible flowers. There would be a moment of panic before we realized we wanted to dig in, too.

When Jell-O pudding pops were advertised on television in the 1980s, they were on every kid’s grocery store wishlist. The idea of creamy pudding that came pre-frozen on a stick sounded delicious. With 12 in a pack, there were usually enough for multiple desserts or snacks for everyone in the family. There was no prep involved whatsoever since all you had to do was open the package and enjoy them.

The general public had become acquainted with the idea of pudding pops long before they went on sale as ready-made desserts in 1979. After all, the brand’s print ads often included recipes for homemade pudding pops back as far as the 1960s. While homemade pudding pops aren’t that difficult to make, getting them from a box was certainly easier.

They were marketed as being healthy snacks since they contained milk, which made working moms more likely to keep them in the freezer for their kids. Plus, Bill Cosby was the spokesperson for the popsicles. He was someone we trusted back then, as he starred in and hosted various wholesome shows for kids, like Fat Albert, Picture Pages, and The Cosby Show. Plus, it came in more than just chocolate and vanilla flavors, with banana, butterscotch, strawberry, and swirl flavors also being available. The marketing and advertising paid off, with the company selling $100 million in pudding pops during its first year, with triple that amount by the fifth year they were on the shelves.

Classic strawberry shortcakes were popular desserts in the 1980s. That decade was also the one when the Strawberry Shortcake character went from simply being a greeting card character to starring in cartoon TV specials and becoming a doll. So, it’s not surprising that people often turned to strawberry shortcake as a dessert option that decade.

Strawberry shortcakes have evolved over the years, with the first recipe for shortcake appearing 400 years earlier in a 1588 English cookbook. The earliest shortcakes were more like scones or sweet biscuits topped with preserves and cream, with fresh strawberries not being the norm for the dish until the 1900s in France. By the 1940s in the U.S., it became common to replace the sweet biscuit with store-bought sponge cake instead, transforming the cake into something easier to make with low effort.

While some people still used a sweet biscuit base, busy 1980s moms often opted for the easy route of store-bought sponge cakes and canned whipped cream or Cool Whip to go with the fresh strawberries. If you’re a kid from the ’80s, you might have memories of individual-sized, bowl-shaped shortcake shells made specifically to hold the strawberries and whipped cream, which you can still find in grocery stores today. Something else you can sometimes still find today in vintage sales are 1980s ceramic cake plates with covers that look like strawberry shortcakes, which is a testament to their popularity that decade.

1980s kids couldn’t believe their luck when Dream Pies started to become a thing, because they were truly the pie of dreams. With a filling for these instant cream pies were made entirely of a mixture of pudding, powdered instant whipped topping, and liquid, they were quite delightful.

Cool Whip had been a fairly popular whipped topping since the 1960s, while an instant powdered whipped topping called Dream Whip had been around since the 1950s. Kraft Foods acquired Dream Whip through a brand merger in 1985. However, the company was already airing commercials featuring Dream Pie in the first part of the ’80s. Home cooks had already been mixing Dream Whip with Jell-O instant pudding together to make pies for years before recipes for Dream Pies started showing up everywhere from magazine ads to box recipes. 

To make a filling for a Dream Pie, you simply whip together Dream Whip powdered mix with milk and Jell-O instant pudding. Then, you add the filling to a pre-baked pie shell and let it set up in the refrigerator for at least four hours before serving. There was also a fruit version that involved using vanilla pudding and mixing in a fruity Jell-O gelatin mix, using boiling water instead of milk as the base liquid. These tended to have whipped topping and sliced fresh fruit on top. There was even a pumpkin pie version that combined plain gelatin, canned pumpkin, sugar, pumpkin pie spice, and Dream Whip powder.

One fancier 1980s dessert that kids enjoyed was chocolate mousse. It had its origins centuries earlier, but Jell-O found a way to make an instant version that made it far more accessible in the 1980s. Plus, you could even find it pre-made.

The type of chocolate mousse that French chefs first made in 1750 is certainly not something that seems to fit with the easy dessert motif of the 1980s. After all, the one Julia Child introduced to U.S. home cooks required a complicated multi-step process involving mixing together melted chocolate, beaten egg yolks and sugar, and beaten egg whites and sugar. In fact, the Good Housekeeping Cookbook from 1986 contained a recipe for this more complicated version.

While some people were still making mousse the long way in the ’80s, the instant and pre-made versions made it more accessible. Jell-O released an instant mousse that decade that was as easy to make as instant pudding. All you had to do was beat the mix and water for three minutes and place it in the fridge for at least an hour to set. The box contained a list of variations for fancier versions, including mocha almond, orange, chocolate chip, and nutty versions. It also suggested serving it frozen. Some brands even released pre-made versions that came in plastic cups like pudding cups. Kroger had one you could get from the deli section of the store. Since then, we’ve also invented a three-ingredient version of chocolate mousse.

The final nostalgic dessert on our list that every ’80s kid remembers is Rice Krispies treats. While the cleanup for making these wasn’t fun, making them always was. You only needed three ingredients to make them, and they didn’t require time to sit in the refrigerator to cool and set like some of the pudding-filled desserts of the era.

Kellogg’s first developed this easy dessert in the 1930s, and the fact that it takes very little effort to make them endeared them to busy ’80s moms. All you have to do is melt marshmallows in melted butter and mix in Rice Krispies cereal. Then, you spread them out in a casserole dish and cut them. Funnily enough, there was a commercial where a mom covers herself in flour to make it look like she spent a long time in the kitchen working hard to make Rice Krispies treats for her family, when all she had to do was melt and stir. You could even make big batches and freeze extras. 

Even though the pre-made version didn’t come out until the mid-1990s, this easy dessert still showed up everywhere from bake sales and potlucks to lunch boxes and after-school snacks in the 1980s, with jazzed-up versions of Rice Krispies treats evolving over the years to make mouths even happier.