I’ve been making this Honey Butter Cornbread recipe for almost 15 years now, because it’s just so good! Sweetened with honey and loaded with butter, it turns out perfectly fluffy and crumbly – just what you need with a bowl of chili!

Yield	Difficulty	Total time
12 squares	Easy	50 minutes

Honey drizzling over cornbread from a wooden honey spoon.

My case for adding actual corn to your cornbread

It’s been a while now, but it did initially take me 20 years to make cornbread by myself for the first time ever. And you know what, it absolutely baffled me that there was no actual corn in the recipe I used. I mean, I KNOW cornmeal is made from actual dried corn, but I meant fresh corn.

So, at 20 years old, I went on a quest to find the best recipe using fresh corn in the batter. I was not happy with the creamed corn recipes I found, because I just don’t always love the taste of canned corn. One day I decided to just blend defrosted corn into my batter, and thus my cornbread recipe was born.

This is a lot of waffling around, but essentially, this is an incredibly simple recipe. You blend the wet ingredients with the corn, you blend in the seasonings and leavenings, and you fold in the two flours. Bake, and done! Serve it warm with a pat of butter and a bowl of chili, and you’ll have the finest, most simple comfort food on your table!

My tips for the best cornbread

I don’t like cornbread overly sweet – I prefer my cornbread not too sweet, because we usually have it with something like pumpkin chili or beef stew. I generally don’t add the optional ¼ cup of sugar that’s in the recipe, but I tested it both ways and it works very well for a sweeter, more cake-like bread.
Blending: I usually make this with an immersion blender, because it’s easy and I can avoid dirtying my large mixer (also, scraping cornbread batter from a 12 year old Vitamix container is not how I choose to spend my days, ha.) If you do use a very high-powered blender such as a Vitamix, add the egg after everything else has been blended – else, the bread may come out tougher than desired. Also, the higher the blender power, the smoother the corn.
Don’t overmix the flour! This is like quick bread, pancakes or muffins: Only fold the flour into the wet ingredients until they’re JUST combined. Overmixing yields a dense and gummy cornbread.

In full transparency, I did make some minor updates to this recipe in October 2026, nearly 8 years after initially sharing it here. I better balanced the cornmeal and flour amounts, and I slightly changed the technique to make it a one bowl recipe for ease.

What pan is best for baking cornbread?

If you have a choice, go with an 8×8 or 9×9 metal cake pan.

Because cornbread batter is heavy, baking it in a ceramic or glass pan will cause the cornbread to rise more unevenly (it will rise more in the center vs the edge).

I will say though, it’s perfectly nice and delicious baked in glass or ceramic. The edges will be baked a little stronger than the middle, and it will be thicker in the middle, but the taste is as delicious as baked in metal.

Note that a glass/ceramic pan may require a slightly longer baking time.

Ingredient notes

Ingredients for honey butter cornbread with text labels.

If you don’t have buttermilk, stir 1 teaspoon of lemon juice OR white vinegar into 1.5 cups regular milk and leave it to stand for 5 minutes, then stir well.
Use whole wheat OR white flour – the recipe works either way, and I like both versions.
Brown sugar: This is entirely optionally and if you add it, your cornbread will be quite sweet. To me, it’s too sweet to eat with savory food with the sugar added.
Honey: I prefer a mild, runny honey here. If yours is very thick, you may want to warm it SLIGHTLY so it’s easier to add to the batter.

Can I make this with canned corn?

Yes, you can absolutely use canned corn in this recipe, I have used canned corn many a times and it works perfectly fine.

I will say that I do generally have a preference for frozen corn over canned, so I do prefer the taste of the cornbread made with thawed from frozen corn.

I never thought I’d write “corn” so many times in a single section, but here we are.

All of the delicious things to eat with cornbread

Now we get to the fun part – everything that tastes delicious with cornbread! Here are some of my family’s favorite pairings, apart from a pat of butter and a drizzle of honey: