Duncan Hines Dolly Parton's Southern Style Coconut Cake with Creamy Buttercream Frosting

Duncan Hines Dolly Parton’s Southern Style Coconut Cake and Creamy Buttercream Frosting, I will always love you.

Dolly Parton. Who doesn’t love her? Red or blue state, old or young, liberal or conservative, country music fan or not, it seems like everyone adores Dolly. She’s given us so much: Amazing songs, fabulous films, an amusement park, free books for children… she even helped fund the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. She can sing, she can write songs, she can play numerous musical instruments (she’s rumored to play around 20 instruments, including the guitar, fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, mandolin, and more), she can act, she even co-wrote a book with James Patterson. What’s not to love about her? For the rare Dolly haters, she’s got quips and comebacks galore. “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb. And I also know I’m not blonde,” she said. She also said her feet were so small because things don’t grow in the shade, a reference to her famously fulsome figure.

Apparently, she also loves to bake. And because of that, we have a Dolly Parton x Duncan Hines collaboration, which includes coconut and banana flavored cake mixes, vanilla and chocolate buttercream frostings, cornbread mix, buttermilk biscuit mix, caramel turtle brownie mix, and a fudgy brownie mix.

They really nailed the packaging on these products: the mixes come in pink boxes with illustrations of a smiling, dolled-up Dolly in a sparkly pink dress, with her signature sky-high hair and megawatt smile. Dolly’s name is front and center in a hot-pink script font, and there’s also her signature on the boxes. Whoever designed these, give them a raise, Duncan Hines! They’re absolutely perfect. One day, they’ll probably be in some museum.

There’s just one minor hiccup for me. These products are sold out on the Duncan Hines website, and although they’re available “in the baking section of grocery stores and mass retailers,” none of the ones near me seem to carry any of the Dolly-Duncan products. After all, I live in New York, much more than a stone’s throw away from Dollywood and the Grand Ole Opry. Walmart seems to carry a lot of the Dolly baking mixes, but there is no Walmart near where I live, unless I want to drive about an hour round trip and cross a bridge to go to one. I do not generally want to do this.

Fortunately, a friend of mine who lives in Nashville (home of Dolly herself!) sent me the coconut and banana cake mixes and a tub of the vanilla buttercream frosting to cheer me up after I’d endured a particularly stressful situation. Just seeing the colorful packages and renderings of Dolly in all her glamour (not to mention the thoughtfulness behind the care package) cheered me immensely, even before I tasted the actual products.

Although we don’t really celebrate Easter, I do celebrate the arrival of spring after enduring another winter. So on Easter Sunday, I thought a nice family meal followed by a dessert was in order. And I remembered the Dolly Parton cake mixes and frosting I had in my pantry. I had also recently purchased some new nonstick 9” cake pans after my old ones had gotten to the point where they were no longer viable. It was time to bake.

I decided on the Southern Style Coconut cake. The directions were simple: Preheat the oven. Grease the pans (I really like Pam Baking Spray for this task). Add melted butter, milk, and eggs to the boxed cake mix. Beat on low for 30 seconds and medium for two minutes. Pour into two cake pans and bake. Let the cake layers cool, then frost.

These days, practically any baking mix or flour comes with the warning “Do not eat raw batter”— and this mix was no exception. Listen, I’m a cautious person. I’m a germophobe and I’m also extremely anxious about potential food poisoning. I own, and regularly use, a meat thermometer to make sure things are cooked to their proper internal temperatures. Once, I went to a hippie wedding and refused to eat anything because I was scared that proper food safety precautions were not heeded and everyone there was going to get sick from salmonella-tainted food. But we all have our blind spots and willingness to take risks. Mine comes in the form of eggs. I have ordered sunny-side-up eggs in diners. And I am not above licking a beater covered in raw cake batter. Throwing caution to the wind, I tasted the raw coconut cake batter. It tasted pretty darn good. I had high hopes for this cake once it was baked.

I followed the directions on the box without making any substitutions or adjustments, baking the cake for the recommended time (24-28 minutes). When the cake layers came out of the oven, they were cooked perfectly — no raw middle or too-browned edges. The cake had also risen beautifully (which seems appropriate for Easter).

Once cooled, the layers came out of the pan perfectly (thanks, never-stick cake pans and Pam Baking Spray!). I used an offset spatula to frost the cake. Personally, I could have used just a touch more frosting than what was in the tub of frosting to frost the entire cake, but I made it work. The buttercream frosting was smooth and creamy, and of course, there was plenty of sweetness. I had some shredded coconut in the house, so I put some of that on top of my frosted two-layer cake.

After we ate and digested our dinner, it was time for cake. “Perfectly moist,” the package promised. Although “moist” can be a controversial word (many people hate the sound of it), I think it’s a good thing when used as an adjective to describe cake. Because this cake was, indeed, moist. And fluffy. It wasn’t dry, and it wasn’t dense. It tasted coconutty, but not overwhelmingly or artificially so — perhaps because the cake mix does contain some actual coconut in the form of Coconut Blend (Coconut Cream, Coconut Flour). I think the ingredient list isn’t too far from what you’d use when making your own cake (essentially: flour, sugar, a leavening agent, a little bit of oil, and some flavoring and stabilizers). The buttercream frosting was the perfect complement to the coconut cake. The main ingredients, of course, are sugar and oil. But like Dolly herself, the frosting somehow feels authentic even though it’s quite artificial. I’ve made a coconut cake from scratch before, and if you put that cake side-by-side with this from-a-boxed-mix cake, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference. My husband and son loved the cake, too (although my husband says "It's a dessert, not a snack." Potato, po-tah-to!).

I look forward to trying more Dolly Parton/Duncan Hines products. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I can’t find them too easily. After all, to quote another cultural icon, cake “is a sometimes food”.