Recipe #23 - Texas Sheet Cake

It has been a really crazy week at my house! I have been cooking all these delicious recipes from Our Best Bites, but I haven't had the time to tell you about them. Perhaps I need to take a few days off of cooking, so that I have the time to blog!

This weekend, we traveled to Boise, ID to celebrate our 14th anniversary. You're probably saying, "You're celebrating in...Boise?" Yes, I know that's not a major travel destination.

Each year for our anniversary, my husband and I go on a little mini getaway - one night away, just the two of us. The hardest part about this getaway is finding someone to watch our kids overnight. I knew that there were several people that I could call to come stay at our house with them, but staying at our house requires that I clean more areas of the house than I wanted to clean. So we thought about who could watch the kids at their house.

Off to Boise we went for a "double whammy" trip - visit grandma and grandpa AND have two fantastic people watch our kids for our little getaway.

We arrived on Thursday afternoon, and my mother-in-law (aka The Goddess of Bread discussed here) was still at work. As a thank you for her help with the kids, we wanted to make dinner for them on Thursday night. Upon our arrival, I headed to the store to get the ingredients for dinner. I was making Spicy Honey Chicken, Sweet and Savory Coconut Rice, Oven-Roasted Broccoli, and Texas Sheet Cake for dessert. YUMMY!

This blog will cover the Texas Sheet Cake and I'll do other entries for the rest of the dinner later. This recipe can be found on page 238 or online here.

I thought I would make the cake first. The recipe says that you can serve it warm with ice cream, and as amazing as that sounded, I needed to be able to crank something out and have it done before making everything else.

The first step is to heat the butter, shortening, chocolate and water until the chocolate melts.

Next you combine the flour with the baking soda.

Then you combine the next set of ingredients.

And pour in the chocolate mixture and mix.

Next you combine the flour mixture and mix REALLY well.  I have made this cake before, and I had one problem with it: I didn't mix it REALLY well.  You know how some recipes say "This batter will be lumpy."  This recipe should say, "If your batter has lumps, your cake will too!"  Don't skimp on the mixing time.  You want every single lump to be gone. (Those aren't lumps in my batter.  They're bubbles from mixing.)

Once everything is mixed well, you put it into the oven for 20-25 minutes.  (Mine took exactly 20 minutes.)

When I went to put this into my mother-in-law's oven, I had a small moment of panic.  Her oven is smaller than mine, and I wasn't sure if my pan was going to fit into it.  Check this out.  It just barely fits.  Phew!

The cake comes out the oven looking like this.

With five minutes left on the cake's baking time, you make the frosting.  This is done by heating the milk, chocolate, and butter in a large saucepan until bubbles form along the edge.

Then you add the powdered sugar and vanilla.  Confession: this recipe calls for 1 pound of powdered sugar and I only had a 2 pound bag.  This is how I measured my powdered sugar:

Pat the bag flat.  Determine what half looks like.   Add that much.  Fancy measuring skills, huh?!
 

Once the frosting is done, you pour it over the cake while both the cake and the frosting are still warm.

The result is perfectly smooth beautiful frosting without hardly trying.

We still served it with ice cream too, although it wasn't warm.

Everyone loved it!  I think almost everyone had seconds too...even if it was in the form of sneaking "just a taste" several times.