Ordering dessert didn’t used to be like this: The server arrives bearing a tiny pie, a plate with nothing more than three donut holes, and a shot glass full of ice cream.

According to a 2007 survey of chefs, bite-size desserts are the hottest trend in fine dining. Fully 83 percent of these chefs said bite-sized desserts are “hot,” — hotter than even such uber-trends as organic produce (75 percent) and locally grown foods (81 percent).

So why the decline in dessert size? Not so long ago, “dessert” at a restaurant meant an oversized slab of chocolate cake. Some restaurants (read: less chic ones) still keep a chocolate cake on hand, although I worry that even such dessert stalwarts may vanish amid the clatter of small plates. Forty-five percent of the chefs surveyed said they considered cakes “passé.”

Some will argue that change is good, that they never could finish that slab of cake anyway, and that bite-sized desserts are helping transform America into a land of healthy eaters. This is probably giving a fashionable trend too much credit — bite-sized pies or no, obesity rates continue to soar.

While the bite-sized vogue will probably pass, American’s passion for dessert certainly won’t. Whether restaurants serve cake or not, grocery stores are still moving plenty of canned frosting and Klondike bars. For all our love of dining out, we go home for dessert as often as we order it, preferring to spoon ice cream in front of the TV.

Sure, privacy plays a factor: My cat won’t question the necessity of New York Super Fudge Chunk. But somehow memory and experience also shapes the dessert palate. Though I’ve been to plenty of fancy bakeries, I still prefer my mom’s chocolate cake to any other.

Over the coming months, this column will explore the method and madness of dessert, from the fanciest tarte tatin and cheesecake cockaigne to the most down-home, wrapped-in-a-paper-towel applesauce gingerbread and sweet potato pie.

I’m already discovering that that there is something intensely different about dessert. Desserts aren’t just sweet food. You don’t bake cookies to feed your family.

Eating dessert, whether it’s a tiny pie or slab of cake, simply feels different from eating the rest of the meal. If you watch diners at a restaurant, you’ll see that people share their plates more often and more willingly during dessert. They also smile and laugh more often. How remarkable that even a tiny thimble full of ice cream has such power.

And I’m hardly alone in this observation. Lori Longbotham, a cookbook author and former editor at Gourmet, has written, “[Desserts] are the world’s favorite comfort food. And that’s saying a lot, since comfort foods are our most beloved of all.” In a similar spirit, Jill O’Connor cites that great patriarch of dessert, Willy Wonka, in her “Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey”: “[His] fantastic world … is adventure. It is magic. It is abundance, luxury, and excess, all tied up into one big, pink, innocent bow of childlike glee.”

Who couldn’t use more childlike glee in their life? Even if it comes in small packages.