Cover Image: Instantly Sweet

Instantly Sweet

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Member Reviews

Thank you to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group – Harvard Common Press for Instantly Sweet by Barbara Schieving and Marci Buttars. This is a book full of dessert recipes for your electronic pressure cooker. The book starts with a great introduction including information getting to know your pressure cooker, tips for great results, specialty equipment, and a trouble shooting guide. I really learned a lot from this introduction and it helped me to actually use my pressure cooker, instead of being afraid to touch it.

The book then moves on to the recipes which are broken out by type, including: Quick Breads and Breakfasts; Cheesecakes; Lava Cakes; Cakes; Pies; Cobblers and Fruit Desserts; Custards and Puddings; and Sauces, Fillings, and Toppings. Some of my favorite recipes include: Overnight Cinnamon-Pecan Monkey Bread, Triple Layer Chocolate Mint Cheesecake, Chocolate Peanut Butter Lava Cakes with Bruleed Bananas, S’mores Lava Cakes, Strawberry Pie, and Chocolate Ganache.

I would have liked to see more pictures in this book. The pictures included were great, but there were only pictures for about a third of the recipes. The index listed things mostly by ingredient; you could not look up a recipe by name. Overall the recipes were easy to follow, used easy to find ingredients, and tasted great. This would be a good source of dessert recipes if you were looking for more ways to use your electronic pressure cooker.

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So many great recipes in this book! It made me want to pull out my instapot and bake them all! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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I received a copy of this book for a fair and honest review. I did not think it was possible to make desserts like this. That is why I requested this book. Some of them were so simple and amazing that I loved that I was wrong and happily surprised. IT was something new I was glad that I took the chance and tried this out. Very cool.

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Instantpots are the new kitchen fad that I can get behind. This cookbook would be great to add to any collection to go along with other instant pot cookbooks. Focusing on sweet, this book has easy recipes to sooth your sweet tooth.

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Nice well written book. Lots of fresh ideas worth looking into. You can learn from this book which is just what you need these days

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I have been looking for a dessert book for the instapot when I cam across this book; I liked the cover picture and the fact that it's a since book with 75 recipes, don't feel like I would be overwhelmed.

This book is recommended for those looking for a dessert book. Barbara goes through the basic of the instapot, actually breakdown each important part of the IP, and the functions of the buttons. This is a good primer of how the IP works.

She goes in to much detail about how desserts are made in the IP, what type of equipment, what you can expect from dessert in IP and common troubleshooting issues.

The pictures are really good in the cook and she has many recipes for cheesecakes in the book. Never knew you could make cheesecakes in IP until a friend brought one over. Sold!

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This was a nice, well-illustrated and easy to use book. I had no idea how many kinds of desserts could be made in a pressure cooker.
There was a lot of variety, the recipes are easy to follow.
A lot of the recipes use boxed cake mixes, which is good if you’re a beginner and don’t like measuring.
There are also many non-cake mix recipes as well.

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I love my instant pot. It makes dinner a whole lot easier and quicker. As much as I love it, I never really thought about using it for desserts. This book of 75 delicious desserts is the perfect addition to anyone owning a instant pot or even a regular pressure cooker. Not only do you get wonderful desserts you also get color photos, tips and tricks and even troubleshooting for instant pots. This is an awesome book.



I received this book from the Author or Publisher via Netgalley.com and chose to leave this review.

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There were so many interesting recipes to try, however I needed more pictures to completely understand. Also, the design of the book wasn't my favorite. It was an okay book.

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Instantly Sweet is a cookbook for electric pressure cookers. I have such an appliance, and it doesn’t get as much use as I would like because I find myself intimidated by it because I don’t have a lot of good recipes to use with it. I like this collection of recipes because the ingredients are ones that easily obtained at my local grocery store, and the recipes are ones I would enjoy along with my family. The cover alone drew me to this book with a gorgeous photo of cheesecake. This cookbook covers electric pressure cooking basics and contains beautiful photos. I’m sure anyone with an electric pressure cooker and a sweet tooth would enjoy this book.

I received an advance reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I was not obligated to write a positive review.

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This is yet another generic dessert book with pics and corresponding recipe.

I thought it would have easy-to-make recipes. Still, a useful book.

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Oh goodness where do I begin?!? So many delicious recipes I cannot wait to try them all! My son and husband are helping me make my way through this book one recipe a weekend and it has been so fun making it a family affair.

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Instant Pots have made cooking easier and faster for everyone, but most of us use them mostly for main and side dishes. But, two chefs, Barbara Schieving and Marci Buttars, have written an excellent cookbook, Instantly Sweet: 75 Desserts and Sweet Treats from Your Instant Pot or Other Electric Pressure Cooker, that contains enough recipes to keep most Instant pot aficionados happy with unique, as well as familiar desserts for months.

This excellent cookbook has beautiful photographs and well-written, easy to understand instructions. Every recipe so far has turned out picture-perfect, and most important, delicious. Schieving and Buttars have good imaginations, so there is something in this book for everyone. In the Breakfast chapter, there is a recipe for Orange-Cranberry Breakfast Risotto, which is delicious and a nice change from hot cereals. There are also several delicious and moist breakfast breads. The book also features lava cakes, puddings, and delicious cobblers.

Instantly Sweet has an excellent chapter with recipes for sauces, fillings, and toppings, made easier in the Instant Pot. There is also a chapter on Getting to Know Your Pressure Cooker which contains valuable advice and hints for cooking in a pressure cooker. A troubleshooting guide is included, and is a great help for those who are new at pressure cooking.

Although there are a few recipes that could stand a bit of a rewrite, (i.e., one calls for melted butter and the instructions tell you to melt the butter again), there is nothing major that would prevent experienced as well as beginning cooks from getting picture perfect results.

All told, anyone who loves cooking in the Instant Pot or other pressure cooker will love this cookbook. It would make a great gift, and will most likely become a favorite for dessert lovers. Highly Recommended.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

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This was interesting... instant pots and desserts are not usually something I imagine together, but the recipes in this one proved me wrong. However, as a cook book I think Instantly Sweet needed more pictures (the few it had really made me crave some of those cakes, especially one particular cheesecake).

My favourite part were the categories for the recipes, and my favourite category has to be breakfast, of course!

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Yes there are sweets that are easily made in the IP, but not as many different kinds as one might think. Too many recipes in this book stretch my willingness to consider them Instant Pot recipes. Yes, the authors show how to do this and that but sometimes the stovetop would be easier.

Why would anyone make a pie in an Instant Pot? The whole point of a pie is to bake in a hot, dry oven so that the crust separates into flakes. Instant Pot cooking is moist cooking and so the pies here have cookie crusts. I would be thrown out of the house if I tried that. Some pies use an oven baked pie crust with the pie filling made in the IP. These are virtually the same as stovetop preparations and I would not bring out the IP for something that takes 10 minutes on the stove. The monkey bread looks like steamed bread, with no browning except from cinnamon.

On the other hand, custards and cheesecake recipes look great, as do lava and bundt cakes. The Banana Boat description not clear and there is no photo so I am unclear about what dessert is intended.

To use this book you need to read whole recipe first to be sure you don’t need the oven, stovetop or broiler to complete it. The sauces and garnishes recipes at the end are not necessarily made with the IP or, if they are, the recipe is almost the same as the stovetop one. The strawberry trifle recipe, for example, uses the IP sauté setting like a stovetop and is not an IP recipe at all

I found the TIP at the end of each recipe to be unneeded. The information could have been easily incorporated into the main recipe. Some TIPs are as banal as "this recipe can be doubled or tripled".

I am still on my "find the best dulce de leche" kick and I do not understand why this book presents yet another "caramelize a can of condensed milk" form. Proper dulce del leche is made from milk and sugar. The TIP here says that cooking the recipe in a large glass jar will also work but will take longer, but does not suggest a jar size or give a hint as to how long it will take. Given how much trouble it is to restart the IP after you have finished the cycle, this is an unfortunate omission.

Overall it's an OK book but there are so many Instant Pot recipe books and web pages, I wonder if we need even more. If you discount the pies and all of the stovetop recipes, this book is very thin.

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Got a sweet tooth? This is your book! There are so many recipes I want to try from it! Sweet and delicious!

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This is perfect for everyone who owns an electric pressure cooker! The recipes are very detailed and definitely doable for even the least experienced cook.

I do not own an electric pressure cooker, so I tried to figure out if the recipes could be modified and unfortunately I think this will be difficult to do. The cooking circumstances in an electric pressure cooker are very hard to reproduced any other way. So if you want to give this as a gift: make sure the recipient owns one of these handy dandy machines!

There isn't a picture for each recipe, which made me a little sad, but the photographs used in this book are gorgeous and definitely compliment the style and the flow of this cookbook.

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Instantly Sweet:75 Desserts and Sweet Treats from Your Instant Pot or Other Electric Pressure Cooker by Barbara Schieving and Marci Butters from Harvard Common Press has beautiful pictures, nicely formatted, interesting recipes.
Some of the chapters in this book include:
Quick Breads and Breakfasts
Cheesecakes
Lava Cakes
Pies
Cobblers and Fruit Desserts
Custard and Puddings
Sauces, Filling and Toppings
The recipes are appealing and I look forward to trying a few especially the Caramel Pecan Cheesecake and the Overnight Monkey Bread.
I have tossed around the idea of getting an instant pot but kept wondering if I really needed another kitchen appliance. This book convinced me I do need one more gadget and thanks to this book I will be adding one to my Christmas List.
Thank you NetGalley, Harvard Common Press and Barbara Schieving and Marci Butters.

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I have always associated a pressure cooker with long cook meats and soups and, to be honest, not much else

This book changed that.

While they may not be time saving, there is certainly a lot of interesting recipes to try in here

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I'm excited by all the Instant Pot cookbooks coming out these days! As the proud owner of a new Instant Pot, it's been a delight to see all the dishes I can cook up in less time, and as someone who also loves baking, this book was definitely on my to-read list. While I've seen plenty of recipes for rice pudding and cheesecakes made in the Instant Pot, I was curious to see what other kinds of desserts would work well in a pressure cooker. It turns out there's a lot!

From coconut flan to s'more bread pudding to white chocolate macademia lava cakes to pineapple upside-down breakfast cake, the diversity of recipes here is impressive. They're creative, accessible, and sound delightfully decadent. It's definitely the kind of cookbook that inspires you to hop in the kitchen immediately. The photography is gorgeous. I mean look at that perfect cheesecake on the cover!

However, what deterred me from actually making some of the recipes ended up adding up to be too much. First off, I don't have most of the equipment needed to make the recipes. They call for smaller versions of the springform pans, round cake pans, bundt pans, etc that I already have. Living in a tiny apartment with very little storage space required having to downsize. Therefore, I would rather not buy a whole new set of smaller bakeware to accommodate these recipes.

Right off the bat, they warn you that the recipes are designed with a 6-quart Instant Pot model in mind, and that if you have an 8-quart model, the cooking times will need to be adjusted. However, they give no guidance on how one could modify the cooking times. As an owner of the 8-quart model, this annoyed me and immediately made me doubt whether I would make any of the recipes. Baking requires precision, and if I'm going to go through the effort of making a cheesecake, I would like to be confident that it won't be overcooked or undercooked when I take it out. Especially with the Instant Pot, which takes more time than you would think to come to pressure or naturally release pressure.

My other complaint is that many of the recipes don't even need to be made in the Instant Pot at all. The main reason people use the Instant Pot is to save time, but most of these recipes take about the same amount of time it would take to just bake it in the oven. For instance, the triple layer chocolate mint cheesecake recipe requires 35 minutes of cook time, then 10 minutes of natural release. That's not to mention the time it takes to get the Instant Pot to pressure (likely another 5-10 min). The recipe also states that if the cheesecake is not done at the end of all of this, you'll need to bring the machine back up to pressure again, cook for another 5 minutes, then natural pressure release for another 10 minutes. So that's a total of 50 minutes plus or minus an extra 20 minutes just to cook a smaller-than-usual cheesecake. I looked up a regular oven-baked cheesecake recipe, and it only requires 45 minutes to bake.

While I admire the authors' dedication to making Instant Pot desserts a thing, I'm not totally convinced. The ideas were great, but ultimately this book needed better execution to make it into my collection.

Overall Rating: 3/5 stars

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