A Sweet Tooth’s Paradise

Story by Melanie Jones

Cinnamon rolls, pies, scones and more attract folks in Winnsboro to Promised Land Bakery every day, but it’s the sweet fellowship that makes them linger.

Diane Burns opened the bakery in November 2022 to support herself in retirement, but she doesn’t do anything halfway. When she began weighing retirement scenarios, she thought about how she was going to spend her time. She decided opening her own business was the way to go, but what kind and where?

The location came first. The former Dallas resident originally thought she’d open her business somewhere in North Texas. “I prayed about it and started looking,” she says. “Eventually, I was exposed to the beauty and fertile ground in East Texas.”

She looked around some more, Mineola and Quitman were on her radar. Then one day she sat down to lunch at Bonnie’s Lunch Box in Winnsboro, which has since closed, and got to talking with the owner. She learned there had been a bakery in town, and everyone missed it after it closed.

Once the right building came along— the former gas station and bait-and-tackle shop at the corner of Walnut and Broadway—Diane made her decision, and the rest is history. Promised Land Bakery was born.

“People told me I would never get the fish smell out,” she says. They were wrong. Now, cinnamon is the primary aroma when customers walk in seeking the bakery’s enormous, fluffy cinnamon or pecan rolls. “They barely fit in our takeout containers,” she says. And those rolls have a history.

Diane didn’t just set out to start a bakery. She was determined to bring something back to Winnsboro

. She found the woman who owned the bakery that closed and reached out to her. “Out of the amazing goodness of her heart, she shared her recipes with me,” Diane says.

The pies made using those shared recipes are also a hit with customers. “It doesn’t matter what flavor,” Diane says. “We constantly hear, ‘That’s the best fill-in-the-blank pie I’ve ever tasted.’”

Promised Land is a bakery, not a coffee bar. There are no cappuccino makers or fancy flavored syrups. “We just have amazing coffee,” Diane says, with real cream and real half-and-half. Diane gets the coffee from a roaster in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and says it’s the best she’s ever tasted.

In addition to Diane, the bakery has a staff of three, Diana Rychlik, Dallas Geney and Diane’s daughter, Honor Burns. Diana is the head baker, Diane says, and comes in first in the morning to get started on the day’s treats. Dallas is the young one of the group, and Diane says she’s an amazing baker. All three of them know how to bake several things on the menu, but each has her specialty.

But Diane says Promised Land is more than a place to eat. It’s a place to feel welcome. The biblical promised land, she says, was a place of peace and blessing. “And that’s what I wanted my business to be,” she says. “I wanted it to be a place where people gathered.”

And she got her wish. People come in to eat and talk. They’ll sit a spell and work at their computers, she says, adding that the Wi-Fi from Peoples has be

en an amazing asset. “It has a very good vibe,” she says of the bakery. “People want to come in and want to stay.”

One of her favorite things about owning the bakery is getting to meet and talk to people every day from all walks of life. “Our heart is just to love on people,” Diane says. “There’s been some great connections and conversations.”

Promised Land Bakery
219 E. Broadway St., Winnsboro
903-342-2670
Find the bakery on Facebook as
Promised Land Bakery Winnsboro.