The Ingredient Incident

So, today... was interesting.

I asked my son to make Banana Nut Bread from a recipe that my mother gave me the other day.  I provided him with all the ingredients that he would need to make it and I set him loose.  I went into the living room to watch the television while he worked.  Things seemed to be going well.  He is a teenager, and has cooked before.  He knows where everything is, how to work the oven, and so on.  He IS a smart kid, I swear...

However, this was not the problem.

I made the mistake of pulling out powdered sugar instead of flour for him.  Normally, people can tell the difference between sugar and flour, but this was POWDERED sugar, and therefore looked almost identical to flour.  The containers also looked almost identical, just slightly different sizes.

He preheated the oven, started to work, and I answered any questions that he had along the way.  He mixed the dry ingredients together, then the wet ingredients together in separate bowls.  As he was greasing the loaf pans, I started mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.  That's when I noticed that it didn't look quite right, but never having made this particular recipe before, I continued on.

He finished greasing the pans, I filled both with the mixture, and we put them in the oven to bake for one hour.  As we were cleaning up, I asked him to put the new bag of flour into the nearly empty container.  As he began to do so, he asked me, "Why are they different colors?"

As I looked in the container, I noticed that what he was about to put into the container was light brown, and what was already in there was bright white.  That's when I realized that he had used powdered sugar instead of flour, and we quickly took the loaf pans back out of the oven.  I took out a large mixing bowl and combined the ingredients from the loaf pans with the same amount of flour that SHOULD have been in the recipe, and increased the amount by a half-cup, to compensate for the extra sugar that had been put in.  Then I divided them back into the two loaf pans and put them back into the oven for one hour.

Crisis averted!