How to Make Mini Honey Butter Biscuits

This post will teach you how to make the absolute best mini honey butter biscuits. This detailed guide is full of tips and tricks and how-to photos to help you successfully make these tender and flaky mini buttermilk biscuits at home.

This recipe makes 18 mini biscuits, which are so good topped with a pat of butter and a bit of fruit jam (like my spiced cranberry jam) or my homemade whipped honey butter.

Need more brunch baking inspiration? Check out my recipes for homemade biscuits, scones and loaves!

📋 About This Recipe

Most honey butter biscuits are plain buttermilk biscuits topped with melted honey butter. My mini honey butter buttermilk biscuit recipe, however, is made with a compound honey butter in the dough and the biscuits are drizzled with even more melted honey butter while they're baking for maximum honey butter vibes. (Have I said "honey butter" enough yet?)

As a pastry chef, I'm always looking for new ways to introduce more flavor to my bakes. So just like my garlic cheddar small batch buttermilk biscuits use an herb butter to amp up the flavor, these honey butter biscuits are made with a honey compound butter for honey flavor throughout the biscuits.

When the chilled honey butter turns to steam in the oven and pushes the biscuit layers apart, the honey is left sandwiched between them so you get honey butter flavor from top to bottom.

I like making these biscuits with homemade butter and buttermilk, but you can totally use store-bought buttermilk. I've even included notes at the end of the post if you want to sub in buttermilk powder instead.

Ingredient Notes

Here's what ingredients you'll need to make these mini honey butter biscuits. Nothing too fancy, though I do recommend making sure to get high quality ingredients for best results.

Pastry flour - I use King Arthur Baking's pastry flour blend to make these biscuits. Pastry flour has a lower gluten content than all-purpose flour creating baked goods that are more tender with a melt-in-your-mouth texture, ideal for biscuits like these!

Baking powder - A little bit of baking powder plus the steam from the chilled butter helps your biscuits rise in the oven. Baking powder is only good for about 6 months so make sure yours is fresh!

Buttermilk - I've made these biscuits with both homemade buttermilk (and homemade butter) and store-bought cultured buttermilk and didn't notice too much of a difference between them! Keep buttermilk chilled until ready to use.

Note: To keep things simple, I'm having you make the compound honey butter with 1 stick (½ cup; 8 TBSP) butter. You'll use it two different ways in the recipe, and might end up with some honey butter left over, which you can spread on the biscuits!

Making Honey Butter

The first step is to make the honey butter. Honey and butter are kind of like oil and water — they don’t really want to combine. You'll definitely want to use an electric mixer for this step.

Wrap the butter in the plastic wrap and chill it in the fridge until ready to use, at least one hour, but overnight is ideal.

When you're ready to make your mini buttermilk biscuits with the honey butter, measure out the amount of honey butter you'll need to for the biscuits. Cut the butter into cubes about ½" inch in size, and place the cubes in the freezer for at least 5 minutes. Refrigerate the remaining honey butter, you'll use it later.

How to Make Mini Buttermilk Biscuits

Making biscuits is a super fast process once you've got everything prepped! You always want very cold butter and buttermilk for biscuit making, so make sure the buttermilk is cold and the honey butter cubes are in the freezer.

Below I'll go into much more detail about how to pinch the butter and layer the biscuit dough so you get nice flaky layers. Don't be intimidated by this; the whole process actually only takes about 3-5 minutes!

Making Flaky Biscuits

The reason it's so important to keep the butter and buttermilk for our biscuit dough as cold as possible and to not to over-mix the dough is so you get nice, light and flaky biscuits.

The cold butter turns into steam in the oven and pushes the layers of dough apart creating those light flaky biscuit layers. If the butter is too warm, or the dough gets overworked, the butter will melt right out of the biscuits in the oven.

Pinching in the Butter

First, coat the honey butter cubes well with flour, then begin pinching them in the flour. The butter will warm up from the heat of your hands, so you need to work quickly.

Toss the cold pieces of butter in the dry ingredients and pinch them between your thumbs and fingers, coating each piece of butter with flour as they get smaller and smaller. 

Once the butter pieces are about the size of large peas or small grapes, the mixture should look like damp, clumpy sand.

Add the cold buttermilk and stir gently just until everything is mostly combined. It’s okay — ideal, even! — if there are still lots of dry bits or visible butter chunks in the bowl.

As long as the buttermilk has mostly been absorbed and you can't see any pooling in the bottom of the bowl, STOP MIXING. Over mixing leads to tough, dense biscuits. You don't want that!

Stacking and Flattening (aka Laminating)

Turn the whole damp mess of flour and butter out onto a clean, lightly floured surface. Dust some flour over the top, too.

Cut a cross hatch pattern across the mess of dough to cut through the butter and redistribute the buttermilk. Gather the dough together on your counter.

Each time you stack and flatten the dough you're building in a new set of horizontal flakes of butter sandwiched between the dough. This gives you extra tall mini buttermilk biscuits.

The dough will become smoother, less crumbly, and easier to work with each time you repeat this process.

TIP: If the butter in the dough seems like it has warmed up or is starting to feel sticky, put it on a parchment lined sheet pan in the freezer for 10-15 minutes before cutting the mini biscuits.

When cutting biscuits, you always want to move your bench scraper in an up-and-down motion. If you drag or slide it along the counter, you'll smush the edges of the biscuits together, ruining all the layers you worked so hard to create.

Before baking, brush just the tops of the biscuits with egg wash. The egg wash will glue the flaky layers together if you get it on the sides of the biscuits so try to avoid any drips if you can.

Then top each mini buttermilk biscuit with a sprinkle of flaky salt.

Baking and Glazing

These mini buttermilk biscuits bake for 13-15 minutes at 400°F. But you're going to pull the biscuits out a bit early for a final dramatic flourish of honey butter.

After 10 minutes in the oven, remove the biscuits and spoon melted honey butter over the tops, then pop them back in the oven so the honey in the butter caramelizes.

This gives you really nicely browned mini buttermilk biscuits with great honey flavor — but makes them much less sticky than if you were to spoon honey butter over them after baking.

Ta-dah! Flaky, tall mini honey butter biscuits with golden brown tops and a stack of flaky layers visible down the sides.

Making Big Honey Butter Biscuits

To make big (regular sized) honey butter biscuits, double the recipe. Pat the dough into a square about an inch to an inch-and-a-half thick, then cut it into a 3x3 grid. You'll get 9 square biscuits.

Bake for 15 minutes at 400°F, then top with melted honey butter and bake for 5-6 minutes more.

A Note on Buttermilk Substitutes

If you don't have buttermilk, you can use buttermilk powder instead. Add 2 teaspoons of buttermilk powder to the dry ingredients and use chilled whole milk instead of buttermilk.

I don't recommend using a milk + vinegar/lemon juice buttermilk substitute here as it will throw off the ratio of liquid and dry ingredients, leaving you with very wet and sticky biscuit dough. 

Practical Tips & Recipe Notes

• This recipe uses a classic 1-2-3 biscuit recipe ratio (1 part butter, 2 parts buttermilk, 3 parts flour) and can be easily scaled up and down accordingly! I've tweaked it slightly to account for the additional moisture the honey provides in the butter.
• DO NOT OVER MIX your biscuit dough. Once you add the buttermilk you just want to fold and stir it gently until no liquid remains. The flour will continue absorbing the buttermilk as you work through the lamination process. At first it might not seem like it will hold together, but by the time you do the final stack and flatten, the dough will hold together just fine.
• A dough whisk is the best tool to use for mixing the buttermilk into the biscuit dough.
• Biscuits are best eaten day-of, still warm. They can be stored in an airtight container overnight.
• I use Maldon flaky sea salt to top my biscuits but any flaky finishing salt is fine.
• Do not melt the honey butter in the microwave — use a double boiler on the stove! You don't want to microwave the honey, it can get a bit weird.
• ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR - All-purpose flour can work if you don't have pastry flour. If you're being picky, look for an all-purpose flour with a lower protein content (9-10%). All-purpose flour is better at developing gluten than pastry flour, so be very gentle with your mixing when you add the buttermilk. Stir gently, just until the buttermilk absorbs. Let the flour finish hydrating while you're folding the dough. You don't want to end up with dense biscuits!

📖 Recipe