Dolly Parton Adds 4 New Baking Mixes To Duncan Hines Collection

Including two iconic Southern baked goods.

Dolly Parton is a busy woman. The Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter hosted NBC's New Year's Eve celebrations, and she's making a rock-and-roll album right now after her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last fall. She's also launching a "Dolly Center" museum in Nashville.

How does the iconic cultural figure find time to bake with all this going on? With her expanding line of Southern-inspired Duncan Hines baking mixes.

In 2022, Parton launched two baking mixes (a coconut cake mix and a banana cake mix) and two frostings (buttercream and chocolate buttercream). This year, she's adding a cornbread mix, two brownie mixes, and a buttermilk biscuit mix.

The Sweet Cornbread mix might raise some eyebrows across Southern dinner tables. As many Southerners know, the debate about sugar in cornbread is as hot a button as any political discussion. Parton, however, is here to say you can have cornbread any way you like.

"Putting sugar in cornbread is so Southern," she told Southern Living. "Most people do. A lot of us that grew up in my neck of the woods just didn't have the sugar, so it was a really special treat."

Lest you think she's casting her vote entirely for sugar in cornbread, she's not: "I grew up not having the sweet cornbread as much as the plain. That was only because we couldn't afford the sugar. But it's Southern either way."

She continues, "I like both, because when I eat the sweet cornbread, I think of it almost like a dessert. To me, it's like something you can have that's just a treat, like you would a muffin. But if I'm going to eat it with something else, I might not put sugar in it."

Her biscuit mix might not require you to measure and scoop flour and dry ingredients, but you'll still have to roll and cut biscuits, just like Mama, to get those extra-tall fluffy stacks of bread. Once they come out of the oven, you can dress them up anyway you want. For Parton, it's all about the apple butter.

"I always loved apple butter. That was always one of those things we had at our house because we canned apple butter," Parton says. "Mama was always great at that. And the jams and jellies, we always canned the blackberries and the stuff Mama used to make."

The baking mixes will begin rolling onto store shelves nationwide this month, with wider availability later in the winter. If you can't wait to get your hands on the mixes, there is good news: Beginning February 8, you may be able to get early access to limited-edition Dolly Parton Baking Collection kits on www.shop.duncanhines.com. The kits, which are $40 plus shipping and handling, include the new baking mixes, a Dolly-inspired tea towel and spatula, and recipe cards for turning the mixes into other family-favorite recipes, like Cheddar Chive Biscuits and Jalapeno Cornbread.

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Read the original article on Southern Living.