Most keen cooks with access to the Internet would have looked up the odd copycat recipe or two. Copycat recipes are attempts to ‘clone’ the most popular takeaway, restaurant and fast food recipes out there – of course they are all closely guarded secrets, like the Colonel and his

“eleven different herbs and spices”. But being a secret doesn’t mean someone won’t try to copy it.

For the Mom and home cook, copycat recipes might make a lot of sense. Instead of buying takeout, you can create the same food in your own kitchens, knowing exactly what’s going into it, how fresh it is, and if necessary, replacing some ingredients with healthier choices and still have family treat time together. It’s a way to get the kids involved in cooking as well – the fun of helping to recreate a Big Mac and fries helps them understand that everything starts as a home cooked recipe.

This is the point Todd Wilbur makes in his latest book The 25 Greatest Top Secret Recipes, that no matter how mass produced these food items are, they all started out as someone's home cooking. Wilbur has published many of these copycat cookbooks through Penguin’s Plume imprint already, but this is the first ebook of recipes that can be purchased for Kindle. That makes this a handy edition which can be used easily while cooking, and puts it at an attractive price too – only $2.99 USD.

Picking the 25 best recipes out of the many hundreds he’s created couldn’t have been easy, but this is a handpicked selection of commercial dishes most American  home cooks would be familiar with. Australian and British readers might not recognise some of them, but Oreos, McDonalds, KFC, Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and Wendy’s Chili, to name a few, would not be unheard of on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Personally I dislike Oreos, I think they taste like hardtack glued together with sickly paste, but the peanut butter cups are irresistible and something called Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits begs to be cooked - I know in the US biscuits are what we call scones, and these look like very delicious scones, with a cheesey, garlicky flavour.  However, the Cracker Barrel Hash Brown Casserole sounds like a cardiac arrest coming at you straight out of the oven. Hash browns mixed with cheese, butter and milk – hmm.

The big surprise is Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently the famous crumbed coating was tested in a lab and found to contain only flour, salt, pepper and MSG – I’m sure KFC vigorously denies that it contains anything less than the fabled eleven different herbs and spices, but I have tried this one, and yes, you can stop mixing different herbs and spices in your home experiments because the plain salt and pepper tastes just the same, even without the MSG.

The 25 Greatest Top Secret Recipes is lots of fun. Wilbur writes in an engaging style, and his recipes ensure you can have takeaway at home with the kids any time you please. The recipes are so well explained that the kids can help you prepare them, and for those not in the US, it’s a chance to try some of those foods we’ve heard of but never had a chance to sample, like those delicious sounding Cinnabon Cinnamon Rolls – and may even that Hash Brown Casserole – well, maybe.

The 25 Greatest Top Secret Rceipes by Todd Wilbur is available from Amazon for Kindle, price $2.99 USD. You can also check out Todd Wilbur’s website for more information on his other books and some great recipes for free. If you've never tried copycat recipes, go ahead, it really is fun and the kids love it.