Sangria & Sunshine

I threw a baby shower last week for a friend from work, and experimented with a few recipes that ended up being quite tasty, so I’ll pass them along:

Sangria

This might not fly in a typical baby shower, but our shower was more of a casual come-after-work-for-BBQ-and-no-baby-games get together.  I found the original recipe online, but cut out about half of the ingredients: sugar,  because I’m not big on overly sweet drinks, triple sec because I didn’t want to have random leftover liqueur, limes because I didn’t have any, and maraschino cherries, which I just don’t like. (Being the chef has perks: you just ignore ingredients you don’t like.) The final recipe is below – it came out deliciously (if I say so myself): fresh and fruity but not overly sweet. 

Ingredients:

   1/2 cup brandy
   1/4 cup lemon juice
   1/3 cup frozen lemonade concentrate
   1/3 cup orange juice
   1 (750 milliliter) bottle dry red wine (I used Yellowtail Shiraz which is ~ $7 per bottle – no need to go super fancy on an expensive bottle, but this is also not the time to use that awful bottle of wine someone gave you that’s been gathering dust in the closet.  If the wine tastes terrible, the sangria will be the same)
   1/2 cup triple sec (as mentioned, I ditched this)
   1 lemon, sliced into rounds (ditto on ditching)
   1 orange, sliced into rounds
   1 lime, sliced into rounds (ditto on ditching)
   1/4 cup white sugar (ditto on ditching)
   8 maraschino cherries (ick, definitely ditched)
   2 cups carbonated water ginger ale (I substituted this with regular ginger ale – to give it a little sweetness/flavor since I ditched the sugar)

 I also added:

2 green apples per batch, cored and diced

Directions:  In a large pitcher or bowl, mix together the brandy, lemon juice, orange juice, and red wine (and triple sec/sugar if you’re using them). Float fruit pieces in the mixture. Refrigerate at least overnight for best flavor (I let mine soak for a couple days – made the fruit deliciously wine-y, but not so long that the fruit got mealy). Add cold ginger ale and frozen lemonade concentrate just before serving – this will help keep it cold without diluting via ice. Serve over ice, and enjoy!

Banana Chocolate Chip Cake

Oh, if only I had taken a picture of the disaster that was our kitchen after this “adventure.” I asked the mother-to-be before the shower what her favorite dessert was, and she responded with the chocolate chip banana bread I make (and bring into work occasionally). I thought to myself: “Well, if it makes a good loaf, it probably makes a good cake, right?” Well it did… with some trial and error.

Mistake #1 began when I accidentally doubled a couple ingredients halfway through making the batter. Baking is fairly finicky – unlike cooking, you need to keep baking ingredients pretty strictly proportional to one another. I didn’t want to throw out the batch, so I doubled everything. I was initially making cake for 20, so doubling meant I now had gobs and gobs of banana cake batter. Thankfully, this ended up coming in handy: see mistake #2.

Mistake #2 occurred when I fell prey to the rookie error of banana bread baking: not realizing that a dark brown color can mean “done” or “waaaay overdone.” After filling two 9-inch cake pans with batter, I baked them for the same amount of time that I would have baked two loaves (1 hour). After an hour, the cakes were nicely brown, I take them out to cool, and upon removing them from the pans thought they seem pretty darn hard. “No problem,” I tell myself. “Maybe they are too overdone to be cake, but they might make nice scone-shaped slices of banana bread.”

Not so much – let’s just say a very sharp Wüsthof knife barely made a dent (read:  cake = brick). Status: scrap in trashcan. Remaining batter status: still gobs left (see Mistake #1). Cleaned/refilled pans, baked for 35 minutes this time, and they ended up being light, fluffy, perfect cake layers.

By this time, it was nearly midnight, and literally every square inch of our small kitchen was covered in bowls, banana brick remnants, or batter splatters. My poor husband came to the kitchen door looking for dinner, stood a moment in silent shock and awe by the kitchen entryway, stuck in his arm just far enough to grab a Cheez-It box, and beat a hasty retreat to the living room.

Ingredients:

½ cup butter, soft
1 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs
1 ½ cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda
1tsp salt
2.5-3 bananas, ripe & mashed
½ cup sour cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (I like dark chocolate chips for the darker flavor)

½ cup chopped nuts (Optional – I skipped them)

Directions: Preheat oven to 350. Combine butter, sugar, eggs. Sift together flour/soda/salt and add to butter mixture. Add mashed bananas and mix together. Add sour cream, vanilla, and chocolate chips (and/or nuts) and stir again. Pour into two 8 or 9-inch greased/floured cake pans and bake ~35 minutes. Let cool 10-15 mins before removing from cake pans; cool completely before icing.

Homemade Icing

What do you need for a cake? Homemade icing, of course. That stuff in the can just doesn’t cut it – and homemade icing is so easy to make that there’s really no reason not to. I did a chocolate icing because I thought it would complement the banana cake – but you can make this batch into vanilla by just leaving out the cocoa powder.

Unlike baking, this is really adjust-ingredients-until-consistency-is-correct. It’s very forgiving (yay).

Ingredients:

2 T from stick of butter (none of the tub stuff!)

~2 C powered confectioners sugar

~3 T milk

~ 1 ½ teaspoon vanilla

~ 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (not the hot chocolate mix stuff!)

Directions: Beat butter, vanilla, cocoa powder, and sugar in a bowl, gradually adding milk until you achieve desired consistency (if you’re icing cake layers, the icing should be easy to move with a knife, but stiff enough that it maintains peaks in the icing when you stir it).  If icing is sitting out and gets hard, stick it in the microwave for about 5 seconds.

Blueberry Scones

Around midnight of the night before the shower, I was hit with paranoia that we wouldn’t have enough food (I should have ignored this paranoia as we had tons of leftovers. Oh well.) I made blueberry scones, a derivation of a chocolate chip scone recipe that first inspired this blog. These also make delicious strawberry shortcake cakes if you leave out the fruit! 

Since that was a couple years ago, I’ve included below for newer readers:

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour

1/4 cup granulated white sugar

1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into pieces

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (get creative here… you can substitute for ½ cup chocolate chips + ½ cup dried cranberries, or raspberries + white chocolate chips, or whatever!)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2/3 - 3/4 cup buttermilk

Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) and place rack in middle of oven. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Cut the butter into small pieces and blend into the flour mixture with a pastry blender or two knives. (The mixture should look like coarse crumbs.)  Stir in the berries. In a small measuring cup whisk together the buttermilk and vanilla extract and then add to the flour mixture. Stir just until the dough comes together (add more buttermilk or flour as necessary). Do not over mix the dough!

Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead dough gently four or five times and then pat the dough into a circle that is about 7 inches round and about 11/2 inches thick. Cut this circle in half, then cut each half into 4 pie-shaped wedges (triangles). Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with a little milk.  Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool; makes 8 scones.

Well, that's it - the guide to baby shower snacks. Since then I've devoted many Swiffer sweepers to cleaning up the kitchen disaster area, but the shower was a lot of fun, and well worth the mess! (I don't think my husband can get scurvy from one night of Cheez-Its for dinner).

Fed Up?

News from all corners of the world seems recently to be edging towards extremism – politically and economically, domestically and abroad. The Dutch prime minister resigned yesterday amid deteriorated budget support. The Socialist French presidential candidate (Ms. Le Pen) is pushing her competitor Sarkozy to the right as well; Sarkozy is now proposing creating mandatory French-language exams for foreigners wanting to settle in France and tightening immigration restrictions. 

China is cracking down on internet access and deleting micro-blogging accounts to control news of Bo Xilai, the Chongquing party chief who was ousted from office in March, while his wife remains under arrest for the suspected murder of a British man late last year. Greece and Spain still teeter on fiscal cliffs as they face desperately needed spending cuts. If enacted, the spending cuts could plunge them even more deeply into recession and exacerbate citizens’ unrest; if ignored, unrestrained spending would propel an already untenable debt. Greece’s exit from the Euro, once unthinkable, could become more likely if countries like Germany and France become more xenophobic and less willing to support their debts.

Among all of the chaos, many ears in the US are in fact tuned in to the Fed and today’s FOMC press conference to hear the Fed’s opinion on the economy (and therefore QE3).

But what on earth is the FOMC? And what exactly does the Fed do?

 Anyone? Anyone? … Bueller?

The Fed is fairly mysterious to most people (I used to envision Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), so I am dedicating this post to the Fed: who runs it, what they do, and why we care.

i.                     Who Runs the Federal Reserve

Most people have heard of Ben Bernake, the current Federal Reserve chairman (and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan). But while Bernake garners most of the media focus, there is actually an elaborate hierarchy governing the Federal Reserve:

·         Board of Governors

o   7 governors (each with a 14 year term, appointed by the president)

o   1 chairman (4 year renewable terms)

·         12 Regional Federal Reserve Banks (shown in the map below)

·         Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)

o   7 Fed governors

o   5 of 12 regional bank presidents (1-year rotating basis)

o   The FOMC meets 8 times per year to determine monetary policy. Minutes are released from their meetings and posted to the Fed website – these are closely monitored, because the FOMC’s plans for monetary policy affect the interest rate and other critical aspects of the economy.

ii.                   What are they trying to do?   

The Fed has 4 avowed primary goals:

1.       Conduct monetary policy to pursue maximum employment and stable prices (their “2-fold mission”)

2.       Supervise and regulate banking institutions

3.       Maintain stability of financial system and contain systematic financial market risk

4.    Provide financial services, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payment system

What does this really mean? The main goal of the Fed is to contain inflation (they benchmark 2% annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures) and create the “maximum level of employment” – i.e. setting monetary policy to encourage employment to be at the economy’s full potential level.

The Fed mainly accomplishes this by setting the Fed Funds Rate, the rate at which banks can borrow money. The lower the rate, the more it stimulates the economy (banks have very “cheap” money, making them more likely to borrow in order to invest in projects), but the lower rate means that the Fed is pumping money into the economy, creating future inflation.

So how does the Fed decide on a rate?

The Taylor Rule is a useful guidepost.

Taylor Rule ->  i = 2% + π + 0.5(π-2%) + 0.5(Y-Y^FE)/ Y^FE

Terms:

i = target interest rate

2% = the Fed targeted inflation rate

π = current inflation rate

Y-Y^FE = output gap (i.e. how big the gap is between what our economy is producing and what it could produce at full capacity)

Below is a graph of the Taylor Rule (and an adjusted “Alternate Taylor Rule”) against the actual Fed Funds Rate (from Marquette Associates)

What are the implications of the Taylor Rule?

Interestingly, you will note in the graph above that the Taylor rate suggested we needed a negative Fed Funds rate in 2009 – though of course this is impossible as interest rates cannot go below zero. But this is an important point. The Fed is “zero-bound constrained,” meaning that once rates are at zero, its hands are largely tied in terms of further stimulating the economy through low interest rates. It has contemplated trying "QE3," a third round of quantitative easing that would try to ensure rates near zero for a longer period of time, but this is unlikely unless the economy continues to significantly falter.

Another interesting implication here is the gap between the Taylor rule and the Fed rates in 2002-2005, where the Taylor rule suggested higher rates before the Fed actually raised them. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but the Fed has been criticized by many of contributing to the housing bubble by keeping rates too low for too long during that time, allowing banks cheap money to give away to risky mortgages and other risky bets.

Also of note is the current 2012-2013 projected gap. Per the Taylor Rule, the Fed should now be raising rates to 1-2%, the Fed has publicly committed to leaving rates around 0% until 2014. With the mixed economic news recently, it is hard to tell the Fed’s best course of action, but leaving rates low for such an extended period of time will likely lead to serious inflation issues once the economy begins to recover. Our supposed economic “recovery” is largely because of QE1 and QE2, which has given us an addiction to cheap money. If the Fed makes it clear that QE3 will not happen, the economy could be in for another drop.

So that’s the Fed in a nutshell. Probably 75% of you now commiserate with the students asleep in Ferris Bueller’s economics class, but for those who always secretly wondered what exactly the Fed does, hopefully this has helped.