Dolly Parton's Special Apple Pie Is Stunningly Huge

Dolly Parton may be most known for her country music career and her philanthropy, but the living legend also knows her way around a kitchen. "I'm a really, really good cook. I'm not a gourmet cook — my food is not pretty — but it's good," she once shared in a Wired interview (via YouTube). "I cook like my mom, my grandmas, and my aunts. I'm still one of those people that really can cook like the old days — that soul food cooking."

Parton's passion for cooking led her to publish her first cookbook in 2006 (via Dolly Parton) and more recently, collaborate with baking brand Duncan Hines for a line of Southern style cake mixes and frostings (via PR Newsire). She's also well known for her amusement park's food, which was awarded for best food four times in seven years by Amusement Today. All the food Parton shares — in her cookbooks, Duncan Hines recipes, and at Dollywood — is inspired by her Southern roots, and her famous apple pie is no exception.

The apple pie at The Spotlight Bakery in Dollywood is a dessert designed to be shared. The Hallmark Channel (via YouTube) reports that a single slice of the tremendous pie is enough to serve a family of four. The reason it's so big, one of the bakery's pastry chefs Lanna Talley told Hallmark, is that it was created in celebration of Dollywood's 25th anniversary. The theme park therefore decided to use 25 pounds of apples in the dessert, or 40 to 50 apples, per Dollywood. The fully assembled pie ends up weighing a total of 32 pounds, lead chef Giget Davis shared to Buzzfeed Bring Me (via Instagram).

Dolly Parton's apple pie can be purchased by the slice for $18.99 each, Visit My Smokies shares, but you can also buy the entire pastry, including the cast iron skillet it's baked in, for $189.99. And luckily, if you can't make it to Dollywood in person, you can still get a taste of the famous apple pie. The Dollywood blog says you can also order it and have it shipped right to your door.

Back in 1986, Dollywood came out with the cookbook "Dollywood Presents: Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking." The now out-of-print cookbook featured recipes for the food that was served at the Tennessee amusement park at the time, many of which came from Dolly Parton's own kitchen. One of those recipes was the park's original apple pie, also known as "Dolly Parton's Apple Stack Pie" (via Archive). This pie actually resembled more of a layer cake than what most people think of as a classic apple pie. To prepare it, six layers of dough were first baked in a cake pan, then stacked on top of each other with apple cinnamon filling between each layer. Rather than 25 pounds of apple, the recipe called for only one pound of the fruit, but still yielded a generous 10 to 12 servings.

As Our State explains, Parton's apple stack pie is technically an Appalachian apple stack cake, a traditional dessert made in the Blue Ridge Mountain region of Appalachia, where Dolly Parton is from. The apple pie that the country singer grew up eating is no longer available at Dollywood, but the current one still has Dolly Parton's stamp of approval. In 2016, she confirmed that she had tried the new recipe (via YouTube) and had nothing but good things to say about it.