Apple Pie and Cheesecake are just about tied. Especially if you put apple pie filling on cheesecake. I eat a lot more apple pie, though. It’s health food, right? 
Peach cobbler is mighty tasty too, but too sweet.
Chocolate cake is good enough that I won’t say no, but it loses out to just about any other option.
Apple pie leads the list for, with this caveat: Must be hot and must have vanilla ice cream on it. I don’t generally like pie, but hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream is the best!
After that:
Chocolate Cake
NY Cheesecake
Peach Cobbler
Cheesecake–but if I see a hint of strawberries or cherries, it’s airborne.
And the drier/crumblier, the better.
Depends on the quality of the restaurant I’m at. If those are the 4 dessert choices at your run of the mill chinese buffet I’d probably stick with the apple pie or peach cobbler. They’ll be made with cheap pie filling but hard to screw up. Cheap cake would be blah and cheap cheesecake is pretty bad.
If it’s a nicer place and all 4 are of good quality made with fresh ingredients that day I’m going with the cheesecake first and the apple pie second.
4
3
1
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sorry I mainly eat at buffets so I can and do get all 4
It’s akin to the contest between a margarita and a piña colada. We know there CAN BE some phenomenal piña coladas. But there are a lot more mediocre cheap bottles of white goop that doesn’t quite taste like pineapple or coconut, just something nassty. And even a mediocre margarita is a superlative drink, so unless you’ve got an exceptional case of a spectacular Piña colada going up against a bland boring margarita, the margarita is going to win out.
In the case of these deserts, Apple Pie ranges from pretty damn decent to mealy, tasteless cardboardy apple-fragments coated in drizzles of boring-ass sugar water, baked into a holding tank probably run by the Department of 'Social Services.
Peach cobbler has a better and more ambitious chance at the awe-inspiring culinary moment. Cobblers can have that loose liquid with the tangy bitey sharpness intersperszed with the delectable strands of white sugared dough, and bursting all along the edges the full-bodied peach halves, roasted and seared and dominating the taste expeirence, dancing a contrast with the delicate strands and little pools of loose liquid; peach cobbler should do an end run around apple pie , chodolate cake and NYS cheesecake and blow us all away with the sheer intensity of wild tastes, nothing quite drowning out other elements and not quite being drowned out itself by the stronger players in the recipe.
Chocolate Cake comes in obviously invited as a retro curiosity, a heavy and plain and unsubtle fortress of dark sweet overpowering blast, quite as robust and energetic as that peach cobbler but without the depth of complexities and nuances of delicate variations. The challenge to chocolate is to lighten, express less sweetly and with a saltier tang, and to sign on herbs and spice co-conspirators to reshape the raw power of chodolate so as to give it filigree, cherished fragilities here among the dark beams of the chocolatl beans that the Aztecs roast.
That leaves NY Cheesecake in all its earnestly playful blonde ambition. Is it traveling without a fruit-compote consigliere, dumping a cloyingly sweet fruitveil of syruped glopp over those slender golden wedges? In the absence of those intruders, do we have blond monotony or is there perchance a swirl of chocolate strokes invading the blond cheesecake territories, or perhaps naughtier ruffians, the pumpkin batter swirls or their distant cousins the tiramisu cheesecake pie layers, all coming in to intersperse their variations?
Overall, the peach cobbler is going to be more likely to have the innovations. The NY Cheesecake is worth a sniff to see if there are exciting extra flavors at hand (key lime? black walnut?) but once you’ve seen that it’s just dry sedges drenched in strawberry jam, get back in line fo the peach cobbler. The chocolate cake is an outlier if worthy of your attention and it should not take long to verify that it doesn’t, that yeah it’s same old boring chocolate adding nothing to your prior experiences with chocolate.
Take one last curious peek at the apple pie. So much room to do something exotic here, powerful and spicy and evocative, but they never do. Or when they do it’s less than what you found in the peach cobbler.
From season to season the offerings may improve and come to dominate or fade from what they once were to be an unimpressive shadow. Hey, I still relish the rare day when the piña colada blows away the margarita. I do but it’s not the pattern of my expectations.
I’m gonna have to go with apple pie. Can I have it à la mode? (No cheese, thanks)
I picked cheesecake, but peach cobbler was a very close second. I almost want to change my vote. After that, it’s a wide chasm, and probably apple pie over chocolate cake. Chocolate cake, most of the time, just sucks.
You’re not getting out of things that easy! All desserts must die! Bow to the power of steak and burnt ends!
I need more time…and samples… Please input more umpty candy…
I voted for chocolate cake, but I’m far from emphatic about it; all four are wonderful and declisciouslll… Sorry, I drooled on my keyboard…
I make an awesome apple pie. There’s nothing exotic about it, no fancy tricks to cover up any weakness of ingredients or technique. It’s the dessert equivalent of high-wire act without a net; simple, pure, and classic. The only egotistical flair is that I use two different varieties of apples. And it fucking rocks.
Now I’m hungry… 
If you had said Strawberry Rhubarb pie it might’ve been a different outcome. I had to go with Chocolate cake.
Depends on what kind of mood I’m in when you ask me. What exactly makes a cheesecake a New York cheesecake, though?
Cheesecake. Especially if “New York Style” means it’s from Junior’s in Brooklyn.
I enjoyed the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had more than the best cheesecake I’ve ever had. But I’m not sure that the average chocolate cake is better than the average cheesecake.
I went for the cheesecake because I have been craving it for a while without picking any up.
For whatever reason I simply can’t think of chocolate cake as a dessert much as I like it for morning or afternoon tea. I don’t know that people serve cake for dessert. Unless it’s a pavlova.
On a hot summer’s day I’ll go for cheesecake; on a cold winter’s eve I’ll go for apple pie or cobbler. If I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll go for chocolate.
Wow, I’m surprised at how well chocolate cake is doing. When we have cake at celebrations, I often talk with other guests about how it would be so much nicer if we could have some other dessert instead of cake, such as pie. And people always agree with me, but seeing these poll results, maybe they’re just being polite and don’t actually agree with me!
I voted for apple pie, but I took a good long time trying to decide between that and cheesecake. Peach cobbler wasn’t close, but I’d still choose cobbler over chocolate cake every time.