Surprisingly, only eight states have an official dessert (along with 15 that have recognized state cookies, state candies and other dessert subcategories). I see this as an enormous oversight and a trenchant example of the failure of bureaucracy to meet citizens’ needs. And so I decided to assign a dessert to every one of these blessed United States.

Such a formidable task requires some ground rules:

1. No two states can have the same dessert.

2. Brands are not desserts. For the purposes of this map, a dessert is a treat that can be made in your kitchen, not a trademarked secret recipe. (I did make a single exception for a certain brand name that has become synonymous with gelatin desserts of all stripes.)

3. No state gets apple pie — or chocolate chip cookies. Assigning apple pie to a single state would be tantamount to declaring that state more American than the others.

Chocolate chip cookies aren’t quite as emblematic as apple pie, and unlike apple pie they have a clear place of birth: the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. But chocolate chip cookies have since spread across the nation.

Remember: Even if your state didn’t get your favorite dessert, you’re still allowed to eat it.

• Alabama: Lane cake

Also known as Alabama Lane cake, Lane cake is one of those boozy, eggy, dried-fruit-filled confections we don’t eat enough of these days. Lane cake is also to Harper Lee what the madeleine is to Marcel Proust: The baked good makes several appearances in the Alabama-set “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

• Alaska: baked Alaska

OK, fine, so the baked Alaska was not invented in Alaska. Cakes topped with ice cream and encased with meringue were served for decades before Alaska became a state, under names like “omelette surprise” and “omelette à la norvégienne” (Norwegian omelette, probably an allusion to Norway’s cold climate). Yet it’s easy to see why the visually apt name caught on: The white, mounded dessert bears more than a passing resemblance to the snow-capped Mount McKinley.

• Arizona: sopaipilla

Sopaipillas are similar to frybread — invented by Arizona’s original residents, the Navajo. While frybread can be served with sweet or savory fillings, sopaipillas are more commonly served drizzled with honey as a dessert food.

• Arkansas: red velvet cake

Whatever its true history, red velvet cake is firmly situated in the public imagination as a creation of the South. And red velvet cake is colored cardinal and white — the official colors of the University of Arkansas.

• California: Meyer lemon cake

Meyer lemons, a cross between lemons and oranges, grow easily in California’s temperate climate, so it’s no wonder Alice Waters’ crew at Chez Panisse seized on them when they were inventing California cuisine in the 1960s.

• Colorado: pot candy

The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado at the beginning of this year opened the floodgates to a vigorous and controversial edibles industry. The question was, what kind of sweet edible should get the crown? Cookies? Gummy bears? Thankfully, Maureen Dowd recently settled matters in a column describing a “caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar” that made her “convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.”

• Connecticut: spice cookies

Connecticut is known as the Nutmeg State not because nutmeg grows there (it doesn’t), but because “its early inhabitants had the reputation of being so ingenious and shrewd that they were able to make and sell wooden nutmegs” — in other words, they were able to pass off fake nutmegs as real ones. Spice cookies aren’t quite as popular in Connecticut as they are in the Old World, but it’s hard to find fault with the soft, aromatic New England variety.

• Delaware: Strawberry shortcake

Strawberries were declared the official state fruit of Delaware in 2010. Strawberry shortcake is indubitably the best strawberry dessert, so this one was easy.

• Florida: Key lime pie

Key lime pie is the official state pie of Florida. There is an annual Key lime pie festival in Cape Canaveral. And the limes in Key lime pie are named after the Florida Keys.

• Georgia: peach cobbler

The Georgia Peach Council offers two cobbler recipes but no pie recipes. Surprising, yes, but I’m not about to argue with professionals.

• Hawaii: shave ice

Made from large blocks of ice shaved into the finest flakes imaginable, drenched with whatever fruit-flavored syrup your heart desires, and sometimes drizzled with sweetened condensed milk, shave ice might be Hawaii’s most important contribution to American culture.

• Idaho: huckleberry pie

Did you think Idaho’s state dessert was going to be a potato cake? Come on, now. OK, fine, potato cake exists — but it’s hardly the regional treat huckleberry pie is.

• Illinois: brownies

Brownies made their debut at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

• Indiana: sugar cream pie

According to the Indiana Foodways Alliance, “Indiana’s contribution to the nation’s pie mythology is sugar cream.” What is a sugar cream pie? The name is pretty literal: It’s a pie whose filling contains cream, flour, sugar and vanilla — no eggs.

• Iowa: cherry pie

Every year at the annual fundraiser known as Veishea, Iowa State students sell thousands of cherry pies to raise money for the Veishea Cherry Pie Scholarship Fund. This bake sale tradition has been going on since 1920.

• Kansas: dirt cake

A chilled concoction of instant pudding, imitation whipped cream, and crushed chocolate sandwich cookies, Kansas dirt cake is the most prominent dessert named in honor of Kansas.

• Kentucky: bread pudding

The home of bourbon deserves a bourbon-flavored state dessert, and the very best bourbon-flavored dessert is bread pudding with bourbon sauce.

• Louisiana: bananas Foster

Invented in New Orleans, adequately boozy, easy to set on fire. Both festive enough for Louisiana’s pre-Lenten revelries and simple enough to make any other time of the year.

• Maine: blueberry pie

Maine is the country’s leading producer of lowbush or “wild” blueberries, which tend to be smaller, brighter, and more intensely flavored than the commercially viable highbush blueberries.

• Maryland: Smith Island cake

Smith Island is a tiny community of a few hundred people on the Chesapeake Bay. When they’re not catching soft-shell crabs, Smith Islanders spend their time making absurdly exacting cakes of six to 12 layers interspersed with chocolate icing. Even though Smith Island cakes aren’t commonly made in the rest of Maryland, they became the official state dessert in 2008.

• Massachusetts: Boston cream pie

The Parker House Hotel alleges that its chef invented the Boston cream pie — a sponge cake layered with pastry cream and topped with a chocolate fondant — in 1856. History blogger Tori Avey takes issue with that origin story. Regardless, the name stuck, Bostonians embraced it, and no less a distinguished Massachusetts family than the Kennedys championed it as a symbol of the commonwealth.

• Michigan: fudge

Anyone with milk, butter, sugar and chocolate can make fudge. But the residents of Mackinac Island, Michigan, have taken fudge to another level, building an entire tourist industry around it. In the history and recipe book “Oh Fudge! A Celebration of America’s Favorite Candy,” author Lee Edwards Benning calls Mackinac Island “the fudge capital of the United States.”

• Minnesota: seven-layer bars

Page 4 of “You Know You’re in Minnesota When …” states “a potluck isn’t a potluck without bars.” Seven-layer bars contain butter, graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, walnuts, shredded coconut and sweetened condensed milk, in that order.

• Mississippi: Mississippi mud pie

Depending on the baker, Mississippi mud pie might contain a chocolate crumb crust or a traditional pie crust, which might be filled with chocolate pudding or chocolate cake or brownie batter, which might be topped with whipped cream or ice cream.

• Missouri: gooey butter cake

Gooey butter cake is a St. Louis curiosity that seems to defy description. It falls somewhere between a sheet cake and a bar: It starts with a layer of thick, extra-buttery yellow cake (doctored from a cake mix box, usually), but the gooey part comes from a filling made of cream cheese, powdered sugar and eggs.

• Montana: s’mores

The s’more was not invented in Montana, but hear me out: Montana has some excellent hiking. And anyone who plans a hike, camping trip, or other mountain-based recreational activity without bringing graham crackers, milk chocolate and marshmallows is a fool. QED.

• Nebraska: popcorn balls

Nebraska is the country’s leading popcorn producer, growing about one-quarter of our national supply.

• Nevada: chocolate fondue

The Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas is home to the world’s largest chocolate fondue fountain, which is reason enough to award melted chocolate dip to this state.

• New Hampshire: whoopie pie

Whoopie pies are not pies: They’re chocolate cake disks sandwiched around vanilla frosting or marshmallow fluff. And Yankee magazine has proclaimed that the best pies are made at a bakery in the Granite State.

• New Jersey: salt water taffy

Atlantic City, New Jersey, has made a number of lasting contributions to Americana: Monopoly, the Miss America pageant, that Bruce Springsteen song and, most importantly, those color-coded candy cylinders.

• New Mexico: Bizcochito

New Mexico became the first state to adopt a state cookie in 1989, when it made things official with this traditional anise-and-orange-scented sugar biscuit.

• New York: cheesecake

New York state is much more than New York City — but New York City’s signature dessert has acquired such mythic proportions that it overshadows the rest of the state’s sweets.

• North Carolina: sweet potato pie

Tar Heels grow more sweet potatoes than residents of any other state, which gives them dibs on the tuber’s most illustrious dish.

• North Dakota: krumkake

Krumkake is not a crumbcake: It’s a thin, rolled up Norwegian cookie, somewhere between a pizzelle and a waffle cone. And it’s pronounced kroom-cacka. The Roughrider State’s official tourism site includes two krumkake mentions on its list of “6 ways to experience ‘home for the holidays’ in North Dakota.”

• Ohio: Buckeye candy

Like a cross between peanut butter fudge and peanut butter cups, Buckeye candies consist of a ball of sweet peanut butter dough dipped in melted chocolate.

• Oklahoma: fried pie

“It was an abnormally cold winter in the year 1893.” So begins the rather dramatic origin story of Oklahoma’s oldest fried pie company. Long story short, the ranchers were miserable that winter until one resourceful woman started making them fried pies — fruit-filled turnovers, basically.

• Oregon: blackberry cobbler

Blackberries grow like weeds in the Pacific Northwest, and Oregon is the top-producing state.

• Pennsylvania: banana split

In 1904, a young soda jerk named David “Doc” Strickler halved a banana lengthwise, nestled some scoops of ice cream in between the two halves, added some whipped cream and flavored syrups, and made history in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

• Rhode Island: frozen lemonade

Rhode Island was a tough one: It boasts two iconic sweet substances, coffee milk and frozen lemonade. After a lot of reflection, I decided coffee milk qualifies primarily as a beverage, not a dessert.

• South Carolina: Coconut cake

Many bakers make coconut cakes, but only one baker has trademarked the phrase “Ultimate Coconut Cake.” The creation of pastry chef Claire Chapman, the pastry chef at the Peninsula Grill in Charleston, the Ultimate Coconut Cake® has been fêted by the likes of Martha Stewart.

• South Dakota: kuchen

Kuchen just means cake in German, and in South Dakota it can refer to a number of different types of cake, but the type recognized as the official state dessert, according to the 2011 South Dakota Legislative Manual, is “a sweet dough crust filled with custard, which is served plain or studded with fruit, such as prunes, peaches, blueberries and apples.”

• Tennessee: Banana pudding

Many states — perhaps all the states — wanted banana pudding as their state sweet. Yet Tennessee is the state that has developed a festival worthy of banana pudding’s charms: The National Banana Pudding Festival and Cook-Off has been running for five years in Hickman County, Tennessee.

• Texas: pecan pie

The pecan tree is Texas’ official state tree, the native pecan is Texas’ official state nut, and San Saba, Texas, is the self-proclaimed “pecan capital of the world.”

• Utah: Jell-O

There’s a reason the so-called “Mormon Corridor” is also known as the “Jell-O Belt” — Jell-O is the most potent symbol of Latter-day Saint culture and cuisine.

• Vermont: maple candy

The Pieces of Vermont store, “Your Vermont maple candy and maple wedding favors specialists,” isn’t the only place you can buy maple candy but it is the most aptly named.

• Virginia: Chess pie

Chess pie — filled with a custard containing eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and usually cornmeal — is awarded to Virginia because the very first written recipe for such a pie, hiding under the alias “transparent pudding,” appeared in The Virginia House-wife in 1825.

• Washington: Nanaimo bars

Yes, Nanaimo bars get their name from Nanaimo, British Columbia. But it’s unsurprising that these sweets, which consist of a layer of graham cracker and nut crust, a layer of pudding or buttercream frosting, and a layer of chocolate, gained popularity south of the Canadian border as well. And it was Seattle-based behemoth Starbucks, which has sold Nanaimo bars seasonally, that introduced them to the rest of America.

• West Virginia: Shoofly pie

Shoofly pie is a colorful name for molasses pie. It seems to have been invented, like so many other desserts, by the Pennsylvania Dutch, but molasses is a beloved ingredient throughout Appalachia.

• Wisconsin: kringle

What is a kringle, you ask? Why, just head over to kringle.com, which tells you everything you need to know: The home page bears several photographs of the ring-shaped, fruit-filled, streudel-like pastries and a large insignia reading “Official State Pastry of Wisconsin.”

• Wyoming: cowboy cookies

The connection between cowboys and cowboy cookies is unclear, unless it’s just that cowboys, like the rest of us, enjoy oatmeal cookies packed with chocolate chips, pecans and coconut.