Guests flock to Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for the rides, the “country” experience, and the array of delicious food. Popular eats include the whopping 25-pound apple pie at Spotlight Bakery and crisp fried chicken at a spot called Aunt Granny’s. But perhaps the biggest culinary attraction in the park is the cinnamon bread.
Patrons line up daily at the Grist Mill to get freshly baked loaves of the famous yeasted bread, which is coated in butter and cinnamon sugar and served with your choice of vanilla icing or apple butter. The mill grinds the flour for the bread on location, and this commitment to quality pays off; they sell up to 350 loaves of the bread every hour.
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Weeknight cooking inspiration, curated and written by longtime ATK author and editor (and avid home cook) Jack Bishop.
My quest to develop a recipe for this bread for the home cook started with research. The queen herself, Dolly Parton, published a recipe for it in her 2006 cookbook, Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s; she suggests using store-bought frozen pizza dough for convenience. The Dollywood website lists a recipe with homemade dough. And there are copycat recipes all over the internet.
I made several of these versions for my colleagues, dutifully took notes on each one, and got to work. My goal was an easy, failproof method to create a tender bread with the perfect balance of sweet and salty flavors.
I started with a tried-and-true Cook’s Country yeasted dough. (Store‑bought pizza dough can save time, but doughs can vary a lot and I wanted full control over the outcome.) Our recipe calls for an autolyse, a step where you mix the flour, yeast, and water together and let the mixture sit for 15 minutes before adding the salt and sugar. This allows the flour to fully hydrate (salt and sugar slow this process, which is why you temporarily hold them out) and ultimately makes for a fluffier, more pillowy dough. From there, I added a few tablespoons of melted butter to the dough to enrich the flavor and texture without weighing it down.
The American Table
Dolly Parton is a singer-songwriter, actress, and country music icon. But she’s also a theme-park owner, philanthropist, and cookbook author. In 2006, she wrote a book called Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s. It included recipes from her family (she grew up as one of 12 children), Dollywood, and her own travels and cooking. In doing so, she followed a Southern tradition of many churches, junior leagues, and other community organizations of selling recipe collections to raise money for a cause.
Money from sales of her cookbook went to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that gifts books to children every month; to date, they’ve donated more than 200 million books to promote and encourage childhood literacy. Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s is no longer in print, but you can still donate to the Imagination Library at imaginationlibrary.com/usa. And Dolly is releasing another cookbook, co-authored with her sister Rachel Parton George, called Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals—a Lifetime of Family, Friends, and Food in September of 2024.
After the dough’s first rise, Dolly’s and Dollywood’s recipes call for shaping the dough into a loaf and then cutting slashes on top before rolling the whole thing first in butter and then in cinnamon sugar. That technique is fine with those sturdier doughs, but with my soft dough, getting consistent slashes and moving it around so much was a bit tricky.
So I deviated slightly and cut the raw loaf into five mini logs. Then I rolled each in butter and then cinnamon sugar (I added a little salt for balance) and arranged the pieces side by side in the loaf pan before letting the dough rise again.
Dollywood-Style Cinnamon Bread
There are lots of reasons to love the queen of country music —and this cinnamon bread is one of them.
Get the RecipeMy construction method worked great and resulted in a deeper distribution of cinnamon sugar into the center of the loaf, thus even more cinnamon per bite. After baking, I gave the bread an extra dousing of butter mixed with cinnamon sugar to mirror the delicious richness of the bread at Dollywood.
I think this bread is plenty delicious plain, but I included a quick glaze as a tribute to what the Grist Mill offers at Dollywood. The bread makes a delightful breakfast treat, and it’s equally appealing with an afternoon coffee or for dessert.
In the words of Dolly Parton, “If you see someone without a smile today, give ’em yours.” One surefire way to do that is to bake them this bread—it will definitely make them smile.
