Frosting from Tyler's Birthday Cake

For anybody that is interested in the recipe for the frosting from Tyler's birthday cake last night, here is a link. Jennifer made it for the first time yesterday and since she was fasting wasn't able to try it when she made it so was happy that it turned out!

Whipped Cream Frosting via All Recipes

Portland Trip: Children's Museum but no Zoo

This is the second in a series of posts about our recent Oregon trip.
For an overview of the whole trip, read Home from Oregon.
For the first installment, read Portland Trip: Silver Falls.


Thanks to Google Maps, I was able to reasonably accurately trace our route that Tuesday in our effort to get to the Oregon Zoo. I'm sure that the zoo is lovely but we never quite made it there. We did see the entrance gate though.

It turns out that this particular Tuesday was "2 buck Tuesday" which brought out the entire population of Portland looking for one last summer outing with the kids before school started. As such, once we got to the parking lot there was no parking left. The parking lot isn't that big to begin with (which was a little perplexing since it is the parking lot for not only the Zoo, but the Children's Museum, the Forestry Discovery Museum among other things as a part of Washington Park (see the map above).

So we considered going home, but while we did we ended up going into Portland for a little bit and then back out on 26 for a little bit, cut across on Canyon before we talked to Kristie about a MAX station near the Zoo that would go to the Zoo. Unfortunately when we arrived, the parking lot there was full as well. We then heard from Grandma Conder that there was a shuttle service from a nearby church. Unfortunately trying to get back on 26 we ended up going south on 217. We quickly got off, turned around and mad it to the church.

Once we got there we had to wait for about a half hour in line for the school bus shuttles. By the time we left though, the line had to be an hour or more long so we got there at a relatively good time. By this time it was almost noon (not 10am like we had planned). The plan had been to go to the zoo for a little bit in the morning while it was cooler and spend the afternoon at the Children's Museum that is on the other side of the parking lot. Jennifer's mom had borrowed some free passes to the Children's Museum from the library so we decided to do that instead of going to the zoo with the masses of humanity in the afternoon sun.

Once we finally got there it was a lot of fun. They have a fun water activity area, a building area, a "big dig" area, an infant/toddler area, a medical area, a grocery store area and others! Tyler really liked the trains (no surprise) and liked it enough that he stayed there while several groups of children cycled through. I was surprised and impressed by his attention span since I had thought that he might get tired of things fast and move on quickly. In some cases we had to pull him away which caused some screaming, but he quickly recovered at the next exhibit. We spent more time there than we had anticipated, but Tyler really enjoyed it and Alex had fun in the "under two" area.

I would be ungrateful if I didn't mention our food stop for the day. On the way back from the Children's Museum, we were pretty hungry since we didn't really each lunch and it was around 4pm (Tyler and Alex had eaten some crackers and snacks) but we decided to try out Burgerville based on Andrew Jenson's recommendation. They also have many seasonal items which at that particular time of year, they have Walla Walla Onion Rings which turned out to be delicious. The other seasonal items on the menu while we were there included an Oregon Blackberry Lemonade and Milkshake. These were awesome and worthy of the cravings that they subsequently induced. I really, really liked the lemonade... it had berries in the bottom which were delicious. They use all local ingredients (like Oregon beef and Tillamook cheese). It was so good that we made sure to stop a few more times before we left.

Tuesday night we went visit Julia in her new house. It was an older home that had some "interesting" renovations done to it by previous owners, but she and Eric has plans to remodel several portions of it as time goes on. Overall it's a nice cozy house. She gave us the grand tour of the yard, the house and then a little bit of the neighborhood. There is a bike trail which is really near their house that goes into Portland so Julia has actually been riding her bike 6 miles into work each day which I thought was impressive. It was a nice house where I think Eric and Julia will be happy. Eric wasn't there because his current job requires that he work funky hours most of the time but he's moving to a new job (with the same employer) in September which will allow him to work a normal work week and see Julia again.

As an update to the last Portland Trip post, I neglected to mention that Jennifer and I went to see the Simpsons Movie on Saturday night which was a lot of fun. The theater was a lot less full than I would have thought judging by the people lined up to get tickets, but I think a lot of people were at The Bourne Ultimatum (which we still need to see).

So that was our second activity filled day. Aside from the frustrations of the parking situation, it was a fun day.

Portland - August 2007

Portland Trip: Silver Falls

This is the first in a series of posts about our recent Oregon trip. For an overview of the whole trip, read Home from Oregon.

We arrived in Portland on Friday night, spent Saturday doing random stuff. Sunday we went to church and Jennifer found out that a lot of her friends from high school were married and moved back into Jennifer's parents' ward. So she got to say hi and catch up with some of them. We then went to the Jenson's in Oregon City where I thought I'd taken some pictures but apparently not. Tyler fell asleep on the way there and slept the whole time we were there so he didn't get to play with Sophie. While we were there for Elanor's blessing we set up to accompany the Jenson family to Silver Falls for a few hours on Monday since the Jensons were flying back to DC on Tuesday afternoon. We did get to see them briefly in Utah (they did a three leg trip... DC to Utah, Utah to Portland and then Portland back to DC) but thought it would be fun to spend some time with them in Oregon as well since they were pretty busy in Utah.

Monday morning we got in the car with Kelsey and Grandpa Conder and took the hour long drive to the falls which are just outside of Silverton. We went to the south fall since it, I was told, is the most spectacular. Although it was not at it's peak in mid-August, it was still a pretty cool water fall. The neat thing about the south falls (where we went) is that there is a path down to where you can go behind the falls.



We went down to see the falls, took the little path behind the falls and then hiked back up (it's like a quarter mile round trip) and had a picnic lunch generously provided by the Jensons. I was very proud of Tyler for doing most of the hike down to the falls himself. The photo above was taken about halfway down the trail and we went over to where you can see the people behind the falls from there. He made it all the way down and over half the way back up. It was fairly steep and it was a little too much for Tyler so I got to carry him the rest of the way, which was almost a little too much for me :)



The rest of the Jenson clan went on a multi-hour hike while Andrew, Michelle, Sophie and Elanor stayed behind with us (with Kelsey and Grandpa Conder) and went to the playground there at the park. We stayed a little bit longer than we had originally planned, but Tyler had a good time and got sufficiently worn out that he was asleep promptly once we were back in the car. This was the first of many days that wore out Tyler which I think he enjoyed (and we enjoyed too since he kinda went nutty with the car trip and then the weekend of not much excitement).

We then went to visit Grandma Conder's work where she proudly showed off Tyler and Alex to all her co-workers (oh, and she did mention Jennifer and I to most of the people :) ).

Jennifer and I then went to McCormick and Schmick's at the Bridgeport Mall for dinner with Andrew and Michelle. Jennifer and I ate there the last time we were in Portland and really enjoyed it and so suggested it for our night out. The cool thing about it is that there isn't a set menu. The menu changes based on what seafood is available and as they say on there website "Some menus change once a year, ours changes twice daily."

The food was excellent. I got Cedar Plank Salmon and Jennifer got Shrimp and Crab Stuffed Salmon. Michelle got some dish that I can't remember what it was, but it was awesome and Andrew got a Salad with Salmon on it. We also got some seared ahi tuna as an appetizer which was quite good as well. Delicious all around. Mine came with an intriguing Berry Sauce for the salmon which was almost like a berry butter and with it's sweetness nicely complemented the salmon. It was quite tasty but I'm still not quite sure how they made it.

We ended with a slice of Key Lime pie and the Jensons had the "trio" which consisted of three small bowls containing a chocolate mousse-like dessert, berry cobbler and creme brulee. The creme brulee naturally steered the conversation towards blow torches in the kitchen which neither of us have, but agreed it would be way cool to have one, especially a commercial grade one that is frequently used on Iron Chef America. The desserts were delicious and topped us all off. Jennifer and I had talked about picking up the check but Andrew beat me to it (I hesitated). His argument was that he was the only one at the table that was currently employed which was hard to argue with (our vacation to Oregon was unpaid since I was literally between jobs). So thanks to Andrew and Michelle for the meal and the fun evening and we'll pick up the next one when we get together again.

So that was the first few days of our trip. I'll continue with the rest of the trip soon...

Portland - August 2007

Dippidee

This afternoon we dropped by a new bakery in American Fork. It was a cute little store near the Costco in Lehi (apparently the boarder between Lehi and American Fork is the road between the two) that we saw last week and today decided to stop by while we were in the area. There are some photos of the inside of the store on their website.

We got a Homemade Oreo and a slice of Chocolate Cream Cake (there was a more involved name, but I can't remember what it is). The Homemade Oreo was Tyler's choice and turned out to be pretty good. The cookie was a little crumbly but tasty. The Chocolate Cream Cake was Jennifer's choice and had a thick coating of thick chocolate frosting. The cake itself was quite dense also. The interesting part was the filling. In the middle of two sheets of the cake is a cream cheese filling that was quite good.

As we were leaving they have a bunch of photo albums on the counter that we picked up and looked at. These were photos of different cakes that they have done. These included some of their 3D cakes and wedding cakes which looked really cool.

Overall it was good and we'll probably go back in the next month or so and try something else.

Dippidee website