In search of the perfect cornbread

Okay, so that title is a bit presumptuous, I suppose. We had cornbread at our small group meeting Sunday night that Leslie had made with Marie Callender's mix and some alterations. It was amazing. We decided last night that we would like more good cornbread, but we lacked the mix, so we made it with this recipe...with a few alterations: I cut the shortening into the flour mixture with a pastry blender because I didn't believe that it would mix in very well. We had no milk, so I used 1 cup rehydrated powdered milk and 1/4 cup half and half (most recipes seemed to want whole milk, but we of course did not have that!). I beat the egg with the milk/half and half before mixing it into the shortening/flour mixture. Finally, we baked it in Ryan's birthday present stoneware pie dish. It was not the perfect cornbread, but it was better than the recipe we've been using from Betty Crocker.