Major fail: Petite Fours

Petite Fours, you know those lovely little cake bites that you see around the holidays, at parties, and in catalogs?  They are delicious and oh so cute, right?  Look almost easy to make too, right?  WRONG!  I was perusing my Better Homes cookbook for a dessert to make today when I came across a super simple looking recipe for really pretty petite fours. 

I've ate them but never made them so I thought I'd try.  And even better, I had boxed cake mix so I could do it quicker.  Cake baked fine, even tasted moist and good.  The first problem?  It stuck to the pan and the entire middle stayed in the pan when I inverted it.  Ah, this handy housewife decided to get creative so I cut all the pieces that I could then put the messy middle back in the cake pan for another dessert idea (more on that in a minute).
While the cake was cooling more,  I made the petite four icing from the recipe in the book.  That all looked and did fine.  It cooled to the proper temp then I added confectioners sugar and blue food color.  Looks runny but I attempt to cover the little cakes anyway.  That was my second mistake.  Runny icing not only doesn't stick on cake, it soaks into it.  After two dippings in the icing this is what my petite fours looked like:

Doesn't look like the above picture, does it? It tastes okay, not like a petite four at all, but okay.
Okay, so back to the crumbled middle part of the cake. I found a can of sweetened condensed milk in the pantry and thought it might be good to boil it until it turned to caramel and pour that over the crumbled mess.   Caramel covered cake?  Yes, please!  Well, maybe not... this is what it looked like:

 

Not very appetizing, huh? And yes, you do see some of the blue under that caramel mess. I had lots of petite four icing left so I drizzled some on this mushy mess. Needless to say, dessert tonight flopped big time. Thankfully, there's cherry cheesecake left from the other night for the Mister to enjoy. I, personally, can't stand cheesecake (and yes, I still make it for him. Now that's love! lol).  I really can do without dessert anyway.  This experiment has been bad on my (already large) waistline.  I can't believe I'm saying this but I'll actually be glad when next week comes along and I can stop cooking and eating all this fattening foods and desserts.
Off to find a dessert to try tomorrow that <hopefully> won't fail! 
Tootles!