Chef Behind ‘The Golden Girls’ Cheesecake Reveals How It Ended Up on the Show (Exclusive)

It’s hard to imagine The Golden Girls without picturing the four ladies devouring a cheesecake over late-night talks.

But Chef George Geary tells PEOPLE the beloved series’ recurring dessert was almost carrot cake.

Geary, in his 20s at the time, was working at a grocery store near Paramount Studios in 1985, and would typically field requests for various TV shows.

In March of that year, he was asked to make a wedding cake for the Golden Girls pilot, in which Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) nearly ties the knot with a man she’s only known for a week.

Geary knew how to modify the shade of the icing to look right on camera, and when the series was picked up months later, he was asked to make another cake for the second episode, which sees Dorothy Zbornack’s (Bea Arthur) daughter getting married.

“Then they started having me do all the food,” he recalls. “Every episode was something weird, and then they said, ‘You know, we want the girls to sit around on this one episode.’”

It was the 22nd episode of the first season, in which Rose loses her job and struggles to find another.

“They’re all depressed and they’re sitting around late at night,” Geary explains, recalling the request for the episode.

“’Could you do a carrot cake?’ I said, ‘Carrot cake? Those don’t look good on film because you bite into it and it’ll crumble,’” he remembers. “At this point, I didn’t know they were going to be doing this same theme for the years that it was going on.”

He continued: “I said, ‘You know, I really think what would look better on camera was a cheesecake,’ because I did a lot of cheesecakes then,” he adds. “In fact, at the grocery store at the time, we had this contest about cheesecakes, how many we could sell or something. I thought, ‘Hey, I can sell more and I can do more cheesecakes,’ so I went ahead and I pitched the cheesecake idea. They said, “Okay, let’s go with the cheesecake.’”

The suggestion stuck. Geary says the first one he made was a chocolate cheesecake, which was followed by plain cheesecake topped with berries. 

“I used to have to do seven cheesecakes for every Friday night taping,” he recalls. “I’m in my 20s and I said, ‘Why do we need seven?’ They said, ‘The girls will cut it and they’ll do something weird and we have to redo.’”

Geary says he made the most cheesecakes for the third and fourth seasons of the NBC sitcom, which ran from 1985 to 1992.

“I kept with about five different varieties,” he shares. They would say, ‘Plain, add berries, don’t add berries,’ and it depended on how much they were going to be talking at the table and how much they were cutting. There’s one episode, they had me do half cheesecake because it was like leftovers. I think they brought out a pint of ice cream, and they were just emptying the refrigerator late at night.”

Geary also remembers requests for Rose Nylund’s (Betty White) hilariously offbeat St. Olaf recipes, such as Sperhueven Krispies and Genurken-Flürken cake.

“When I would get something weird for Rose cooking, I had to make sure it didn’t look like anything you ever saw or you would buy, so I couldn’t just go to the grocery store,” he says. “The one that I thought was hilarious was the ‘bacon, lettuce and potato’ sandwiches. I said, ‘Well, could I do a potato chip?’ They said, ‘No, no, we want a very thin, thin slice of potato just showing a little bit.’ I thought, ‘Well, all right.’” 

According to Geary, the cheesecakes would be stored in the refrigerator in the foursome’s kitchen during tapings. The vegetable bins contained sodas, which warm-up comedian Michael Burger would give out to the audience.

Burger went on to work on Hot in Cleveland, and called Geary before one of White’s birthdays.

“She was the last Golden Girl left and he asked me if I would come to the set, so I did a big cheesecake for her because she liked cheesecake,” Geary says. 

He notes that Bea Arthur (Dorthy Zbornack) wasn’t a fan of the dessert, and when rewatching the show he only saw her appear to take a real bite in one episode.

Geary says he tends to gravitate toward the late Estelle Getty (Sophia Petrillo) the most when watching the show — he and Getty even hosted the Christopher Street West Pride Parade (now known as LA Pride) together.

“They all were so personable,” he says of the four women. “I mean, you hear [about] them fighting or someone didn’t like somebody, and I really didn’t see any of that, to tell you the truth. They all were professionals.”

While Geary says any confection eaten over late-night conversations would’ve been memorable, he notes, ” Cheesecakes are really decadent.”

After working in Hollywood, Geary was a pastry chef for the Walt Disney Company, where he made many cheesecakes for Club 33. He’s now the author of 16 cookbooks, including 125 Best Cheesecake Recipes and The Cheesecake Bible.

The Golden Girls, currently streaming on Hulu, remains as popular as ever ahead of its 40th anniversary on Sept. 14.  However, Geary says he “didn’t realize it was going to be as iconic as it was” during its initial run.

“It’s like when you’re in the moment, you don’t realize there’s history happening,” he says.

“A lot of people that were like between eight and 10, they said, ‘We watched it with our grandparents,’” he adds. “You got that a lot, and you don’t get anything like that today because we have so many things on TV, but it was a different time.”