The Dreamy Filling Your Hawaiian Roll French Toast Deserves

Making French toast with Hawaiian rolls is a brilliant way to use up leftover bread. Better yet, the petite dimensions of the rolls produce a series of mini French toast sliders that are adorably cute and perfect for posting on Instagram. If you want to go a step further, you can turn your charming little French toasts into a delectable dessert by stuffing them with a dreamy cream cheese filling.

To prepare your stuffing, beat room temperature cream cheese with softened butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla until fully combined. The next step is to make a batch of TikTok's viral Hawaiian roll French toast by dunking the rolls in a classic batter made of eggs, milk, and vanilla before frying them in a skillet. FYI, slicing the rounded edges off your batch of King's Hawaiian rolls first will guarantee that each side has a flat surface that can lay flush on the pan and caramelize. It also produces cute little slices of bread that truly mimic the square appearance of a full-sized batch of French toast. Coat your French toast in powdered sugar (or even cinnamon sugar) while it's still hot so the sugar clings to the bread. Then pierce through the center of each roll through the side (without going all the way through) to create a pocket to pipe in the luscious vanilla-scented cream cheese filling.

A quick trick that turns stuffed Hawaiian rolls into fancy crème brûlée French toast is to make a caramelized sugar coating. All you need to do is heat sugar and water in a saucepan until the mixture turns golden and syrupy before dipping your stuffed rolls in it so every side is covered. Do this very carefully because the sugar will be extremely hot. Allow the syrup-coated rolls to cool down, and you should find that you've created a crackable crust that you can tap with the back of a spoon, that looks just like the topping on a classic crème brûlée. The combination of the crunchy caramel, custardy Hawaiian rolls, and the heavenly filling produces a scrumptious dessert that's packed with texture and flavor. That said, if you like your puds to have a balanced quality, sprinkle a dash of sea salt into the caramel to lend it a salty edge.

A couple of other ways to upgrade French toast, no matter whether you use the pre-packaged frozen variety or make your own with Hawaiian rolls, are to serve them with a scoop of ice cream or turn them into a baked bread pudding.