While Colonel Sanders has perhaps the most famous secret recipe around, with his "secret blend of herbs and spices" 
in original recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, that chicken recipe is not the one I've tried the hardest to duplicate.
Believe it or not, the two secret recipes whose codes I have failed to crack are both for cornbread. It seems like such a simple thing, but I just can't get it right.
I have spent years buying cookbooks and ingredients and trying just about every cornbread recipe I've found--and some that I've made up as I went along, and I just cannot get my kitchen to turn out cornbread like I can get in restaurants. And not just any restaurants, either: my favorite cornbread can be found at Chi-Chi's, where it's called "Sweet Corn Cake," and at Boston Market.
I have subjected my family to many, many cornbread experiments over the years, to the point where my older two children want nothing to do with cornbread, corn muffin, or corn in any form unless it's on the cob. I guess they figure I can't cook anything else with that. Some of these experiments have been tasty; some have been edible, and some wound up right in the trash can, as I figured that they weren't even fit to toss outside for the birds and squirrels.
But hope springs eternal; I'll keep trying. With every new cookbook I find, I test out the cornbread recipe to see if it tastes like my favorite cornbread. After all, as cartoon characters Billy and Mandy always said, "Real corn makes it special!"
