Key West is no place for guilt or regrets, as most visitors discover once they yield to the island’s sun-blasted hedonism.

Which is why my sister and I are sitting in a pretty shaded courtyard at Kermit’s Key West Lime Shoppe, heedlessly devouring the world’s most sublime dessert before it drips all over our fingers.

Oh, Chocolate-Dipped Key Lime Pie-on-a-Stick, where have you been all my life?

This triangle of sweet and tart creaminess wrapped in a shell of Belgian chocolate goes way beyond decadence, which is in the rear view mirror, fading fast.

We’re sliding into a food coma when I hear Cathy ask, “Are you the chef?” as a small man in chef’s clothes, with a green hat and lime green patent leather tennis shoes crosses the courtyard.

And so we meet the pasha of portable pie: Kermit Carpenter, the man who dreamed that one day Florida’s iconic pie would no longer be tethered to a dessert plate requiring a fork, but could be frozen on a stick and carried anywhere a tourist with a sweet tooth wanted to go - at least, before it melted in the Key West heat.

At his yellow wooden shop across from the Key West Bight, Carpenter had been selling pies made from his grandmother’s classic recipe — just Key lime juice, eggs and sweetened condensed milk — when the food-on-a-stick craze hit in the late 1990’s.

“I got the idea from seeing frozen cheesecake on a stick in California,” said Carpenter. “I figured Key lime pie would freeze better than cheesecake. Then I figured, I’ve gone this far, why not dip it in Belgian chocolate?”

In Key West, excess seems just right.

So many people clamored for his slices that Carpenter opened a second location on lower Duval Street.

Traditionalists can also order an un-dipped slice of pie on a plate. The company bakes 200 a day, or more than 72,000 a year, in Key West and in a production facility in Deland, near Orlando.

Carpenter is proud to say his pies contain a tad more lime juice than many others.

“Mine is a pie with pucker,” he said.

There’s certainly nothing bland about Carpenter’s pies or his marketing strategy. This cherubic man in chef’s togs sometimes stands outside his yellow and green shop, armed with a fake pie that he threatens to throw at the tourist trolleys.

Naturally, the tourists love his act and flood into the shop.

Fame arrived with appearances on the “Today” Show, the Travel Channel and the Food Network, which ranked Carpenter’s pies number five on a show called “America’s Ten Best Sweets.”

Carpenter also sells salad dressings, dips, marmalades, skin lotion and candy, all made with Key lime juice.

But it’s hard to find Key limes in their namesake habitat these days.

Hurricane Andrew destroyed South Florida’s commercial Key lime groves. New citrus pests and diseases have reduced even backyard crops, so Carpenter has to import Mexican limes, which is what Key limes are called south of the border.

In the Caribbean, they’re known as West Indian limes.

We say goodbye and climb back on our bikes, a little woozy from the sugar buzz.

My sister, whose strict adherence to workouts and healthy eating lets her rock a bikini at age 55, sighs.

“Let’s go back later and get another one,” she said.