Honey Butter Croissants - Cheddar's Copycat Recipe (2024)

With a little time you can make your own flaky, buttery croissants at home with delicious honey butter drizzle.

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About Honey Butter Croissants

Last week we stopped byCheddar’sto celebratesome good news about new jobs with our good friends. It was the first time an old friend of mine and I had ever been to this restaurant, so we fumbled our way through orderingwhile our companions (who already knew the ropes) promptly ordered the honey butter croissants. I’m always a sucker for croissants, so when they offered one to meI already had my greedy little hands on one before they even finished the question.

As I was eating, my friend leaned across the table and whispered, “Can you believe they charge $2 for 3 of them?”

And at that moment, no, I couldn’t believe they actually charged$2 for 3 croissants, especially when these croissants were about the same size as a the bake-and-eat Pillsbury variety. The croissants were good, yes, but were they $0.70 a piece good? I wasn’t sure. The rest of the menu boasted fairly reasonable prices so it was odd that they’d charge so much for so little onthis one item.

But if you were to ask me that same question today, I would tell you, yes, I can totally believe they actually charge $2 for 3 croissants because I madeit my mission to recreate Cheddar’s honey butter croissants at home and now know first hand what all is involved. And it’s not even because thecroissants are hard to make – the process itself, at it’s core, is an easy one – but it’s more thetime involvedin order to make a proper croissant that can be a pain (and pricey!).

The key to a good croissant is to havefluffy, airy layers within the bread, and those layers are created by threading chilled butter within the dough through a process called laminating. Laminating is basically just a fancy term for rolling and folding dough in such a way so that the butter is sandwiched inside the dough and yet is not absorbedin the raw dough. This means that the dough and butter must remain thoroughly chilled at all times, and that chilling process is where the time investment comes in.

So while you can’t exactly wake up on Saturday morning and have croissants in a few hours, you can make them ahead of time. And I totally see myself doing that, because I now know from experience that it is so worth any trouble it might be to make homemade croissants. This knowledge will be dangerous. Trust me.

Making these was a little victory for me, because homemade croissants were yet another entry on my cooking bucket list that I can now scratch off – and it must have been high up on the list, too, becausethis was probably the first time I felt really proud of what I accomplished. These croissants were definitely a labor of love (and time!) to make, butI know it’ll be easier the second time around, especially since I won’t be watching the clock as much while the dough chills. It’s a bad habit, but I can’t help it; as a noobie cook, I’m always anxious to get to the next step, like the next plot turn in a movie. To me, waiting around doing nothing is worse than holding a hand mixer for 15 minutes straight.

And, of course, I’m always anxious to get to the eating part.

I was also pretty excited with how the honey butter drizzle turned out. It’s pretty spot on with the restaurant version, and it’s only 3 ingredients.

I tried both dunking and drizzling the croissants with the honey butter sauce, butin the end, I opted for both.

Because why not?

If you’re going to do something, do it right.

Even just looking at these pictures, I know I’ll be starting the “croissant process” again soon. I only made one batch and I’m already spoiled by being able to pop one of these in the microwave and drizzle it with a little sauce for breakfast.