Since we were being pedantic, I was about to correct you. However, due to Gaudere’s Law maybe going to bite me in the butt, I decided to check. In this context, despite the pronunciation being like the sweet treat, deserts is spelled correctly.
Ignorance fought!
I just think of “deserts” as being another way of saying “what you deserve”. It’s easier to remember the correct spelling that way.
Ha, I went through the same journey as you. “Just desserts” is not only the way it’s pronounced, it also just seems to make more sense-- getting the dessert you deserve, as in getting a metaphorical poo pie if you are in the wrong.
Ignorance fought times 2!
That makes two scoops of sand?
Yep, in that sense I’d like to see donny two-scoops getting his ‘just deserts / desserts’. He can go pound sand.
Pot, meet Kettle.
Probably you know this, but that’s exactly what it used to mean. It has survived only as a fossil word in the expression “just deserts”.
Nitpick: not always with the modifier “just”. “To get one’s deserts” is used synonymously with, although AFAICT somewhat more rarely than, “to get one’s just deserts”.
Yup! Per Merriam-Webster, this is the etymology of the word “desert” used in this context:
Middle English deserte , from Anglo-French, from feminine of desert , past participle of deservir to deserve
So it’s basically a synonym, just one not used in most modern speech outside of the “just deserts” idiom.
If you remember that etymology then it becomes easy to also remember the spelling.
Also, the word “just” is used in the sense of “justice” rather than the sense of “only”. It basically means “the justice you deserve”. Like karma, or “what goes around comes around”.
Here I was hoping for some juicy schadenfreude and all I got was an etymology lesson. 
You went to watch a fight and a hockey game broke out.
Well, one thing I was surprised to learn from current events is that Russell Brand endorsed Trump in 2016, and appears more recently to have gone all-in on reinventing himself as an alt-right conspiracy theorist.
So recent events are not only the just deserts for a sex predator, we can feel A Perfectly Reasonable Amount of Schadenfreude for things happening to Brand the Trump-enabler.
I find his political transition so surprising that I can almost give credence to the suggestion that he started the whole thing because he knew #MeToo would take him down sooner or later, and he wanted to set up a narrative that “they” are trying to frame him to shut him up. Almost, but not quite. I think the more parsimonious explanation is that he’s just unhinged, perhaps exacerbated by drug abuse.
Stone cold guilty, though, and this has been the least surprising of any of the #MeToo movement revelations.
I had the impression the character he played in “get him to the greek” was pretty much himself with some magnanimty added in.
semitary - if for old trucks
As an aside, am I the only one who pronounces the two words (just and just) differently?
I bet it’s just you. Or maybe just you.
How do you pronounce them? They are the same when I say them, and I really can’t imagine a different way to pronounce them.
I’m imagining “juhst” and “joohst”.
I pronounce them the same.
I was imagining gist and juhst.
I pronounce “just (only)” as “jest” (rhymes with “best”), and “just (justice)” as, well, the first syllable of “justice” (rhymes with “bust”).