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I've cloned 999 recipes since 1987 and I think the next recipe I create should be entirely up to you. 

It was 22 years ago when I first received the chain letter that claimed to hold the secret recipe for Mrs. Fields famous chocolate chip cookie (you can read more about the chain letter with its bogus story here). When that silly letter failed to produce a decent copy of the popular cookie I got to work creating a real knockoff recipe, and I haven't stopped cloning famous food since.

Now here I am, nine books later, pondering which recipe to clone for #1,000, and I thought I'd let you decide. After all, it has been you all along - fans of the Top Secret Recipes books - who have helped choose which recipes I dissect. For years now I've been recording the recipe requests that you've sent to Top Secret Recipes Headquarters, and it's that list of ideas I first go to when picking the recipes to clone for each book.                                                               

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-- Kramer, 1995

When the series finale of Seinfeld was announced in 1998, my brother and I jumped on a plane and flew to New York City for three days so that I could clone a few recipes from Soup Kitchen International, the real-life soup counter that inspired the "Soup Nazi" episode from the TV series. I figured these new copycat recipes would be a good tribute the end of a really great show, and everyone who couldn't make a trek to NYC could taste some really great soup -- or at least a knockoff of some really great soup.

We brought along a cooler filled with ice packs, Tupperware, and Ziploc bags, and for 72 hours we had nothing on the agenda other than staking out Al Yeganeh's take-away soup kitchen and securing our precious samples. I knew that the selection of soups changed every day so we would have to get lucky if we were going to snag some of the same soups mentioned in the 1995 Seinfeld episode.

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It's been a really long time since I've been graded for my work; the last grade I received came somewhere around my final day of college in 1985. But now, my all-time favorite magazine, Entertainment Weekly - which I read from cover to cover every week - reviewed my new book in a beautiful 2-page spread, and at the end I got a grade. Just as with every movie, TV show, or book that I'm revved about, once I picked up the issue I jumped right to the end of the review to check out the report card and was stoked at what I saw: Book reviewer Jennifer Reese gave Top Secret Recipes Unlocked a solid B.

So, of course I went back to the beginning to read the review and saw that Jennifer and her crew put Top Secret Recipes Unlocked to the test. I like that. They cooked several items from the book to determine if the clone recipes I created matched up with the original brand-name stuff:

"Although Wilbur promises the reader clones of brand-name food, in the recipes we tested here, he failed to deliver a single decent facsimile. This was simultaneously funny and kind of sad."

Alright, I know. This may look like I'm getting slammed, but you have to keep reading:

"His problem isn't that the recipes he's devised aren't good enough, it's that they're too good. It appears to be all but impossible to make anything at home that is as expensive, stale, and artificialtasting as what you can buy."

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Todd Wilbur, author of Top Secret Recipes Unlocked, is our guest blogger during the week of November 23nd. If you have any questions for Todd Wilbur, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on Top Secret Recipes Unlocked:

More than 4 million Top Secret Recipes books sold!

The kitchen clone recipe king is back with a new Top bestselling Top Secret Restaurant Recipes collection-the first book since his bestselling Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2. Wilbur takes readers behind the scenes, revealing the key ingredients in some of our favorite foods such as Starbucks' Peppermint Brownie, Krispy Kreme's original glazed donuts, Panera Bread's cranberry walnut bagel and Wendy's Garden Sensations Manadarin Chicken Salad. The book will feature 115 new recipes, including 40 previously unpublished recipes such as:

•Panera Bread French Onion Soup

•Burger King Onion Rings

•Chick-Fil-A Honey Roasted BBQ Sauce

•McDonald's Cinnamon Melts