Sweet cornbread

November 9, 2016 1:03 PM

I'm revving up for Thanksgiving (and in need of some comfort food today). What's your favorite recipe for sweet, moist, cake-like cornbread? Bonus points if it tastes like Marie Callender's cornbread mix.

I know there are hundreds of cornbread recipes online, and to wit many recipes that claim to be like Marie Callender's cornbread, but I've tried several recipes (among others) and have generally found them insufficiently sweet and/or overly dry.

I'm looking for cornbread that is definitively sweet, moist, fluffy, and much more toward the cake-like side of the spectrum than the bread-like spectrum. It needs to be baked in an oven in loaf or muffin tins, not cooked in a cast-iron skillet. (I basically want the opposite of this previous question -- I know, scoff at these inauthentic requirements if you must, but that's how my family prefers it.)

As this is an American food, I expect largely American volume measurements; if you could specify how you measure your flour and cornmeal into cups I would greatly appreciate it -- e.g. if you dip and scoop, sift your flour, fluff and spoon the flour in, etc. That said, I'd strongly prefer weight measurements (e.g. 170g/6 oz flour) if possible.

posted by andrewesque to Food & Drink (11 answers total)

This recipe is amazing and exactly what you're looking for: Golden Sweet Cornbread.

It's cakey, it's soft, it's moist, it's sweet, it's amazing. I bake it in a Pyrex baking dish but you could bake it in a loaf pan or muffin tins (baking time may vary, but just check it with a toothpick). Sorry that it's American volume measurements - I dip and scoop with cup or half-cup measuring spoons for flour and cornmeal and sugar (no sifting, no fluffing) and I'm pretty lax about my measurements (I sometimes do the baking powder and salt by pouring some into my palm and eyeballing it), so I think you'll be okay following this even if it's not exact. It's always turned out deliciously for us.

Good luck and enjoy!
posted by bananacabana at 1:10 PM on November 9, 2016

Marcus Samuelsson's cornbread from Red Rooster in Harlem is pretty spectacular.
posted by uberchet at 1:17 PM on November 9, 2016

Funny, this flew across my radar the other day: Yankee Corn Bread
posted by rhizome at 1:37 PM on November 9, 2016

Our recipe: http://www.gagehillcrafts.com/cornbread/
posted by terrapin at 1:52 PM on November 9, 2016

Why not use Marie Callendar's cornbread mix?
posted by ewok_academy at 2:45 PM on November 9, 2016

Ina Garten has my go-to corn muffin recipe for what you describe: they're made with a lot of butter and (preferably) whole milk, along with more sugar than normal, so they turn out awesomely moist and cake-like and more on the sweeter side. I've made them a bunch and they're always a hit.

There are no measurements by weight in this recipe, but as they're more of a sweet bread/cake sort of muffin than a regular baking recipe that relies on precision in ingredients I've never had an issue.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/corn-muffins-recipe.html
posted by warble at 3:52 PM on November 9, 2016

Response by poster: ewok_academy: I just want to be able to use general-purpose baking ingredients and avoid buying a single-use mix that I can't really use for anything else (I bake semi-regularly, so aside from the cornmeal I already have everything called for in most cornbread recipes).
posted by andrewesque at 4:00 PM on November 9, 2016

Jiffy Mix!
posted by HuronBob at 6:52 PM on November 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

The easiest recipe conversion would be to convert 1 cup (of anything) to 250ml. The latter is actually a little bit more, but if you use that conversion for all the liquids as well as the solids, I think you will be fine. (In the US, where the metric system is supposedly loathed, all the measuring cups are marked in both cups and ml.)

I found this site (which I've never seen before) which says 1 cup of cornmeal is 170g. It looks like it could do most of your other conversions as well.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:36 AM on November 10, 2016

A tip for evaluating recipes: I've found that if there's more corn meal than flour, you won't get a cake-like texture.
posted by wryly at 9:19 AM on November 10, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks for all the recipes! I'm going through them and will report back. Ina Garten's corn muffins are baking as we speak.

SemiSalt: my favorite conversions website is King Arthur's. I am actually in the US, so can easily get customary measuring cups and spoons, but I'm trying to avoid volumetric measurements of any kind in any system for flour (as it can vary from 113g to 150g for "1 cup flour")
posted by andrewesque at 5:50 PM on November 14, 2016