I'm Ruth Mae, I'm 74 years old, and I've been baking since I was tall enough to reach the counter. I grew up outside a small town in rural Georgia, where my mother never bought a dessert she could make herself, and Sunday afternoons meant a cobbler cooling on the windowsill before anyone was even allowed near it.

In my early 60s, a doctor's visit turned my kitchen upside down. I was told I was prediabetic and needed to cut out nearly everything I baked. I wasn't about to give up dessert entirely, so I went back to what I knew; my own recipes, and spent years one at a time figuring out how to keep the taste and lose the spike. My doctor was surprised at how well it worked. I wasn't.

These are the exact desserts I still make every week in my own kitchen for my grandkids and whoever happens to stop by. I'm not a dietitian. I'm just a woman who found a way to keep dessert in her life, and wants to share it with you.