Instant Pot Chicken Orzo Soup and a Sheet Cake

It has been a really great week for home cooking! Two of the best things I made this week were a chicken orzo soup in the Instant Pot and a pretty solid Texas sheet cake.

Instant Pot Chicken Orzo Soup

I married into an Instant Pot household. My mom, when I was young, would often cook with her pressure cooker, but I always found the contraption a little intimidating. But my husband had an Instant Pot for about a year, and once we got married, I learned to use it a little. I'll admit: it's pretty great. Instant Pot butter chicken is about as good as you can get for homemade Indian food. And for hard-boiling eggs, it cannot be beat. It just makes certain dishes sooo much easier. It also removes some of the difficulty of cooking certain meats: you just always know everything will be fully cooked.

So my husband received the America's Test Kitchen Instant Pot cookbook for Christmas, and we've used it for a few things, most recently a Chicken Orzo Soup.

Instant Pot Chicken Orzo Soup and homemade sourdough bread 

The soup gets a bit of complexity of flavor right off the bat with a blend of onion and sliced fennel bulb. The aromatics are garlic, bay leaf, fresh thyme sprigs, salt, and pepper. Add in chopped carrots, 6 cups of water, and 2 T. of Better than Bouillon. Add two chicken breasts (not cubed or anything) and pressure cook for 9 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken, bring the pot back to a boil, add the orzo until fully cooked. Shred the chicken and add back to the pot! Remove the bay leaves and thyme sprigs: ta-da!

The ingredients

It's really just chicken noodle soup: but the fennel makes it a bit more interesting than diced celery. And the orzo makes it feel a bit more elevated. Also, you only use 1/2 cup of the orzo, which leaves you with like 80% of the package. That stuff will last for a while. It was a delicious dish, and provided us with enough leftovers for the next day's lunches!

Texas Sheet Cake

My first Texas Sheet Cake

Ok, sheet cake seems to be the kind of dessert that leads people to say "oh, my aunt/cousin/grandma/mother-in-law gave me a recipe that's better than any other sheet cake" and therefore you will not need this. However, what would you say if I told you (a) I've probably only had Texas sheet cake like three times ever, and (b) I've definitely never made it myself. So this was my first stab at it. It just wasn't a thing in our house growing up, and I don't really know if it's a Deep Southern thing, I just don't know. It's just not something I have strong feelings about.

But yesterday afternoon, I had taken a half-day because my vacation hours are maxxed out, I was watching the Mandalorian and thinking of what to do. So I decided to bake. I opened up Eat What You Want by Gaby Dalkin and skimmed her recipe for Texas Sheet Cake. I already had all of the ingredients and got to work.

It's a tiny bit of work: it requires some melting and boiling on the stove (both for the cake and the icing). But other than that, it is definitely not a hard cake to make. I would probably have benefited from adding some parchment paper to the pan, but nonstick spray seemed to be mostly sufficient. And once it was done, it was a decent cake. (Wow, rave reviews huh?) But I do mean that in a very good way: it was tasty, not overly sweet, would certainly be a crowd pleaser. But it wasn't anything terribly brilliant as far as I could tell.

Ingredients for the cake: 2 c. flour, 2 c. sugar, 1 t. baking soda, 1 stick butter, 1 c. water, 1/4 c. cocoa, 1/2 c. buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1 t. vanilla, 1 t. salt. Mix the first three ingredients together, set aside. Add the next three ingredients to a sauce pan, mix together, and bring to a boil. Be careful to not let it burn. Once it comes up to a boil, remove from the stove. Add the mixture from the saucepan to the dry ingredients. Mix together. Whisk the remaining ingredients in a separate bowl, and add it all to the big mixture. Add to a sheet pan and bake for about 15 minutes at 400 degrees. Keep an eye on it: if it starts pulling away from the edges of the pan, you might be close to overbaking.

Ingredients for the icing: 1 stick butter, 1/4 c. cocoa, 6 T. milk, 3 c powdered sugar, 1 t. vanilla. While the cake is baking, add the first three ingredients to the same saucepan and heat until all is melted and combined. Keep over low heat, sift in the powdered sugar, and add the vanilla. Mix together until everything is incorporated. Try to avoid lumps (unlike me!) so that it goes onto the cake in one nice flat sheet.

Remove the cake from the oven, let cool. Keep mixing the icing so it doesn't set up too much, but heat it a little if necessary. Once the cake has cooled, pour the icing over the cake. Let it set up before cutting so that it has that nice crinkly look to it! 

If you try these, let me know in the comments what you think! Any replacements or substitutions? Does your family have a perfect-and-un-improvable recipe like I mentioned? 

Today's delights:

• Bell's, the Michigan brewery, did a special release of Hopslam Ale. It's almost never bottled: you can usually only get it on draft. So we were able to pick up a case at a local liquor store. It was delicious and felt like a treat!
• We received a new set of sheets for Christmas. They're the Classic Core set from Brooklinen. We have used them for the first time this week, and I think they're soooo luxurious. I absolutely recommend them!
• I had a good visit to the chiropractor yesterday during my half-day. And I'm still really loving the Mandalorian!

Find something to delight in today! -A