mother's day recipe fail

I had the job of covering dessert for Mother's Day lunch - my favorite part to do.  So where did I turn for a cute, easy, but impressive looking idea?? Why Pinterest of course!  Which is where I found this idea:

Aww, so cute and yet easy, right?  Right. That's what I thought.  I didn't have a cupcake pan just like that but figured a "regular" one would work just as well - the little bowls just wouldn't be shaped like that.  No problem.  However, I made the mistake of attempting to make this easy idea even easier by using a cookie mix. That would be my mistake.  A cookie mix is a lot more (ahem...sorry, m...have to use it...) moist than making cookie dough from scratch.  I thought once I spread a clump over the cup, it would just stay in place and bake just like the picture. Wrong. They all spread together to make one ginormous MESS! Like so...

By this point it was 10pm Saturday night and I wasn't sure what in the world I was going to do.  Thankfully I had prepared two mixes together, not being quite sure how much I would need, so I still had half the dough left.  So I flipped the pan back over and filled the cups with dough, baked them, and then while they were still hot, stuck little medicine cups inside each one as they cooled to make a different, smaller kind of bowl.  Not what I wanted, but it would have to do. 

Thankfully, these turned out well enough to use and even turned out pretty cute when it was all assembled.  The original idea was to put the ice cream in the bowls but since these were smaller, I reversed the plan and put the fruit in the bowl and the ice cream on the side:

 That ice cream, by the way, is Private Selection from Kroger and is called English Toffee Caramel and turned out to be reeally good!

In between dinner and dessert, Daniel insisted on doing presents and had picked out this card for mom:

Front:

Inside:

Hahahahaha!!!!  Yeah right.  :}