Knock Off Panera Bread's "Big Kid's" Grilled Cheese

Friday's are my absolute favorite day of the week. In the dental field, no one works on Friday's! And actually in my job most of the time I only work 3 days a week. Yay (although not so yay for the bank account)! It has always worked out really well because usually Ben gets off early on Friday... Well at least he used to. He just got promoted (YAY!) last week so I'm not sure how his hours will be now. 

Anyway, Friday's usually consist of grocery shopping, procrastinating school work, catching up on blogs, and occasionally going to lunch with Ben whenever he got off of work, then going to pick up Brody from school. A couple of weeks ago whenever Ben got home he wanted soup and started looking through cabinets. I had been wanting Panera Bread for a while so I suggested we go there. It was amazing. I had the vegetable soup with Pesto and half a 'big kids grilled cheese' and he had the chicken noodle soup in a bread bowl and multiple bites of my sandwich. 

I felt kind of dumb because whenever we ordered the guy was like "Do you want the regular grilled cheese or the big kids?" What? You mean there is more than one option? I went with the big kids, obvi. It was so good. So good that I looked up the ingredients and insisted that I try making it at home with my panini press (which was a Christmas present from Ben last year!). Because let's face it, panera doesn't exactly have a dollar menu and eating out gets expensive.

I just used regular Bunny bread. Nothin' fancy here. But according to the Panera menu they use Miche bread.

Knock Off Panera Bread's Big Kids Grilled Cheese

Sliced white American cheese

1 block gruyere cheese

1 block white cheddar cheese

bacon (about one slice per sandwich), cut up

butter

bread

Preheat your panini press (or skillet if you don't have a panini maker). Shred the blocks of gruyere and white cheddar cheese and mix together. Spread butter on one side of bread. Put one slice of white American cheese on the side of the bread without the butter, sprinkle bacon on top of cheese , then sprinkle some of the gruyere and white cheddar cheese mixture on top of bacon. Spread butter on another piece of bread and put sandwich onto panini press, butter side's out, for about 4 minutes, if using a regular skillet brown for about 2 minutes on each side. 

P.S. My time being Raspberry Beige's featured blog of the month is coming to an end. Make sure you check out her giveaway and maybe YOU could be the next blog featured! She has given my blog A LOT of exposure!