My Grandmother's Butterhorns (2024)

By Karrie on April 27, 2020 | Updated April 27, 2020 | 37 Comments

These are the BEST Butterhorns with swirls of rich, buttery layers and topped with sweet frosting straight from my Grandmother’s recipe box. They are so much better than your regular sweet roll!

Inside my Great-Grandmother’s Old Recipe Boxis a butterhorn recipe. When I first saw it I was like “What is a butterhorn?” I had never tried a homemade butterhorn before and knew I wanted to try to make them. They turned out to be a soft buttery gorgeous roll drizzled with a sweet frosting glaze. Mmmm.mmmm..good.

Here is the recipe card. The card is really old and I imagine her typing this out with an old fashioned typewriter. Can you picture it?

When it was time to cook these I gathered up my ingredients. Then got to work.

The cast of ingredients wasn’t too hard – flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, yeast and salt. I had all those ingredients on hand.

HOW TO MAKE BUTTERHORNS

I followed the directions from the recipe card, however this first batch I didn’t cool my milk long enough and it killed my yeast. The dough never would raise up. So I tried the recipe again the second day and it worked like a charm.

So note to you all – don’t add the yeast when your milk is too hot.

This dough was really really sticky, so after it’s mixed up I greased a bowl and added the dough inside to let rise. It was doubled after an hour.

Next, I took the dough and split it in half.

Then I rolled out each half, buttered it, and cut it into 16 pie slices.

The directions say then to roll them all up individually and place on cookie sheet to rise again. Here is how it looks when you roll them up.

After about 40 minutes of rise time again they went into the oven to bake.

While they were baking I made the frosting as directed on the recipe (only I didn’t have cream hanging around, so I used my raw milk, trying to get the top part that sometimes is cream). Either way it was wonderful..and very delicious.

I drizzled it onto the Butterhorns when they came out of the oven and they looked so pretty.

And buttery.

And delicious.

Expert Tips

Make sure your milk is the right temperature before adding it in to the rest of the ingredients. For active dry yeast, the temperature should be between 105 and 110°F.

The dough will be sticky! Dust the counter top with flour before you start rolling out your dough. Sprinkle flour over the rolling pin then roll the rolling pin over the flour you sprinkled on the counter to cover it on all sides. Then add your dough onto the flour-covered surface and you are ready to roll…literally.

Use a pizza cutter to cut the dough into 16 pieces. Trust me, it makes cutting the dough into equal pieces so much easier than using a knife.

My opinion on these Butterhorns? I don’t know…I liked them but I didn’t LOVE them. I guess I wanted them to be a bit more sweet or something. My kids thought they died and went to heaven though – they LOVED them! In fact they were all gone by that next morning.

If you liked this butterhorn recipe from my Grandmother’s Recipe Box check out these other ones!

• Great Grandma’s Apple Brown Betty Recipe
• Vintage Sunshine Cake Recipe
• Great Grandma’s Mile High Pumpkin Sundae Pie
• Chocolate Jumbles {From my Great Grandmothers Old Recipe Box}
• Grandma’s Homemade Buttermilk Biscuits Recipe

If you bake these up let me know what you think as well. It’s fun to try new recipes out – especially old fashioned ones.