Well, when my mom baked a cake, she used Duncan Hines (when she wasn’t using Betty Crocker.)
My mother was a very Southern-influenced “most everything from scratch” home cook, but even she used packaged cake mixes most of the time.
Yep, very authentic.
My grandparents weren’t prolific cooks. I love cooking but lean heavily on simple, fresh ingredients and mostly taught myself. I can’t remember the last time I used boxed cake mix. But I’ve been able to meet southern grandparents from more rural areas who were known for their food. I love their food and have a huge respect for them. I don’t know if it was cost, price, or lack of availability but their family recipes were often a mishmash of boxed cake mix, can of soda, or box of pudding. A lot of those recipes were lost on younger generations even though they loved eating them. This seems on-brand for that and I’ll check them out if I get the chance.
Dolly can bake me a cake any day of the week. She helped provide me my vaccinations, she buys books for schools, and her music was a big part of my childhood. She’s just awesome in every way.
EDIT: Crap, I just realized there may be ONE celebrity I idolize. Oh well. If it’s going to be one, it should be Dolly.
I want that pink dough scraper.
My people, at least, were abysmal cooks and only my great Aunt (German) made decent food, but she was 3 states away. We also weren’t a very close or loving family and saw extended family about once per year.
My mother in particular could boil the life out of any vegetable, and turn any cut of meat into a hockey puck. Her spaghetti was essentially ketchup with some overbrowned beef tossed in, along with a single (whole) garlic clove. I’d literally go to bed early on “Italian night” to avoid it. A cake made from a box was a goddamn relief! 
Dolly is awesomesauce for her literacy and vaccine work alone, and she deserves a medal for using her wealth for that, and not a genital shaped space vehicle. Pie > cake. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/03/pie-verus-cake-scientific-approach.html Cake mixes are good for people who like them, it’s slightly better than buying a cake, and mixes are not a bad way to get kids into the magic of baking. I prefer to make from scratch if one is required (and I’ve been convinced a pie is not needed), but the kid likes the wizardry of “cake in a box”.
Yeah, my grandmother could and did cook from scratch, but when a processed-but-easier option became available, she took it. Having to cook for 7 on the heels of scarcity (Depression, WW2) presumably had something to do with it.
A lot of my family has foods they are good at, and I can crank out a really good from scratch cake…
But that’s work, sometimes a lot of work, and if the kids just want to ice some cupcakes then a box of mix is the quick and easy way to go. Growing up my mom really only made pound cake from scratch (icing was not her thing).
As a side to the boxed cake mix discussion, Ghirardelli brownie boxed mixes, you can’t beat them. I’ve made several different brownie recipes and they are good, but nothing that blows away the Ghirardelli.
I once made a six layer key lime cake with cooked frosting completely from scratch. It took two days to fully cook and assemble. Took like thirty minutes or more just to squeeze a dozen or two limes for juice.
I once made a lemon cake in 30 minutes from a box while I did laundry.
Both good. Both worth doing at least once. Radically different experiences and if I needed the former done sooner I’d advise buying some kind of basic cake from a bakery to use or using a mix just to speed things up.
Cake mix is one of the foodstuffs that you don’t really think about or appreciate until you go to a country where they do not exist. (Plus, Japan doesn’t have yellow cake at all. There are plenty of cake shops; none of them have yellow cake.)
I am hoping to be able to travel to the States this year and I’ll be sure to pick up a few boxes of Dolly Parton cake mix just for fun.
Baking in different parts of the US can be odd. What do you mean butter is a different shape? Or regional differences in flour.
Baking in a different country is a lot more wierd. I kind of assumed most training and food prep leaned on what the French standardized (outside of using metric). But salt is different, I had trouble finding plain aluminum (not non-stick) pans, butter isn’t even in sticks, and staples like chocolate chips aren’t common, ovens are not just smaller, they can have weird modes. Nothing insurmountable, it’s just that with baking it’s harder to taste along the way and the “chemistry” makes it harder to substitute on the fly.
Not close to Detroit. But I can mail you some ketchup Ruffles or Old Dutch All dressed.
Oddly, we can sometimes get Ruffles All Dressed. 
They’re OK, but no replacement for ketchup. Someday, when this pandemic wanes, I’ll just drive over to Windsor to grocery shop. 
I’d offer to mail some cake mix in return, but I will be surprised if any shows up around here. I guess we’ll find out in a few months.
ETA: Mom and I discovered, during decades of baking, that Betty Crocker mixes usually result in caeks who are lighter, fluffier, and much more
than what Duncan Hines mixes produce, but I’m more than willing to try Dolly’s!
A UK recipe with the direction, “Set your Aga to 3,” would make no sense to most Yankistani bakers, and annoy the UK ones who can’t afford an Aga.
I am so conflicted.
I’m a scratch baker, who will recommend mixes to people who wouldn’t bake otherwise, but prefer my cakes to have the minimum amount of added preservatives and such.
I love Dolly Parton, but hate the Big Ag system of which Con Agra is a major part.
Yeah, I’ll probably buy them if I see them. I do love Dolly and her combination of pragmatic capitalism and philanthropy.
Just happened to see that Dolly is releasing her first-ever novel in March, co-written with author James Patterson, called Run, Rose, Run.
And, the novel has an accompanying soundtrack. That’s something I never heard of…but it makes perfect sense.
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