On Sunday we had a large group of friends over to sing Christmas carols. The children were all cooking and baking their little hearts out. On this particular cooking marathon, Colter learned a valuable lesson.

Our piano teacher had given us some friendship bread starter. Colter had successfully divided the starter and was making two loaves to serve to our friends that evening.

He was flying solo on this recipe, but I happened to glance into the bowl at one point, and asked, “Colter, what did you just put into the bowl?” (Because it looked like powdered sugar, and I knew the recipe did not call for powdered sugar). His reply, “Baking powder.”

A quick glance at the recipe showed me that he was supposed to add 1 1/4 tsp baking powder. “How much baking powder did you put in?”

“1 1/4 cups.” Yep, you read that right – cups.

Now, it wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he had taken his hand, and mushed the baking powder down into the batter, so there were nice hand prints in the baking powder.

After gently explaining his error to Cole, Mom tried to remove as much baking powder as possible, (but knew there was still way too much in there). Cole proceeded to finish the recipe anyway.

So for those of you non-chefs out there, baking powder causes things to rise, or as we say, “powder puffs”. But if you put in too much powder, it rises, and then falls. Like this:

It was a good lesson for Colter to learn!