The Birthday Celebration Concludes with my worst baked good ever

Today I learned what happens when you fail to put "the love" into your baking - or "the salt", as the case may be. Not feeling like baking a cake when I remembered it at 10pm last night, I promised I would make it in the morning before we headed out to Mesa Falls for the day.

Well, I gotta tell ya, I didn't feel much like baking a cake at 6:00am, either. And Hershey's Cocoa, Sam's Club size, completely pulled a fast one on me, lining up all the ingredients in nice, neat columns except for the teaspoon of salt off-center to the vanilla in the middle column. You have to give it to me, though - as soon as I dumped it out of the pans and tasted a bit that broke off (and went "eeww") - I knew exactly what went wrong. No salt! I looked at the recipe on the container, and lo and behold, there was the strange typo that led to my 2nd disaster with a Hershey's chocolate cake.

The first being on my 13th birthday when I made my first cake by myself and mis-used the teaspoon measurers (filling them, giving 1.5 tsp instead of 1 at the line). Needless to say, my mom was not too happy with me (she'll probably remember the story differently!).

Nor was I happy with myself, when I realized the salt-less, sloppy wonder I had put forth this morning. I refused to ice it - David made a valiant effort to save the day, with the most bizarre chocolate icing I've ever seen - wet and gritty, made with some powdered sugar, some regular (we ran out of powdered). He added salt to the icing to make up for the lack of salt in the cake (I'm not kidding). He asked for advice on how to get the "icing" (I use that term loosely) to stick to the sides of the cake - I said, honey, I can't help you with that. The cake is crumbling, the icing is wet - you'd do better to just kind of pour it on top and hope for the best.

And yet, somehow, it was quite the hit with the kids. And while I had said I would refuse to eat the monstrosity parading as a cake, it really was kind of tasty. Unusual, but tasty.

We had to carry the cake all the way down to the bench right next to the Upper Falls, because with the late-season despirate-to-get-that-last-sting-in bees swarming, David remarked, "Bees don't like water." We walk down there, right at the spray, and I'm like, hmm, I've got forks and spoons and a sloppy-joe cake. How do I cut slices, no less get them on plates? Use the handle-end of a plastic fork, of course.

Gosh, what a mess.

After the bee-infested picnic, we did a bit of hiking here and there, taking in the best autumn scenery gets in these parts.

We stopped in at the City Drug in Ashton, a place we've been stopping ever since David did the Mesa Falls Marathon the year Ethan was born. Sad news - looks like the "drug store" part (you know, goofy gifts and soda fountain) will be closing down soon. That might've been our last chance for the huckleberry milkshake I've praised here in the past... Of course, given my lactose-aversion, I chose to go for a classic cherry Coke - the real kind. Mmm... the last time I had one of those was during my short stint as a hostess at Leiby's ice cream bar back in Tamaqua when I was 16. You might imagine I was the worst hostess in the history of the establishment (I would try to work on my chemistry homework on the backs of scraps of paper I'd find on the tables I was supposed to be clearing).

Anyway... hopefully I'll load up some of the pictures David took with his fancy camera I'm afraid to use.