Weird Things: Dessert Time

I have wanted to blog for sometime as my life is basically weird, but mostly in a good way. Take for instance the other day. I decided to make a dessert I had seen on face book (and as an aside here I will say that I probably need to de-friend Pillsbury or I am gonna gain like 300 pounds, but anyway...). This was an ice cream recipe and as we have been in triple digits here for like two weeks that seemed like a good idea. It probably was in theory, in execution though no.not.really. It said to spread the cook dough over the bottom of the pan. As I am always trying to make things lower cal I asked my husband to pick sugar free versions of the ingredients but Chuck said that there was no "sugar free sugar cookie dough." (Which I think is a problem and somebody ought to create one!)Anyhow, you spread the cookie dough over the bottom of the pan. Check. Then you crumble up toffee bars (I got Heath) and put them over the top of the cookie dough and you bake it. Now, I thought the toffee bars would melt, doesn't it sound like that is supposed to happen? But not for me, no I got toffee bar pits or if you want a golf analogy the toffee bars made the roughs in my cookie course.
I guess this was ok. It would have to be since it was a done deal. Then I cooled this concoction for 45 minutes. Then it said to spread the ice cream, which was sugar free, over this base. Well to spread ice cream you have to warm it right? So I had left mine out for the 45 minutes so it could mostly melt. I poured this and spread it over the base. Now it called for hot fudge syrup to be poured over the ice cream. (Sadly there is no sugar free version of this, at least not at my Kroger's. Get with the program people!) So I poured this but it sank through the melted or mostly melted ice cream and make a layer over the cookie dough. I could have totally skipped this step and it would have been even better I think without it. Next I was supposed to put whip topping over the whole thing. I had decided that whip topping would be better with maraschino cherries in it. Why? I guess it was the ice cream that made me think of cherries and whip topping would be better with those right? Right?
Ha!
The cherries acted like little depth charges and sank to various levels: some were whipped topping layer, some ice cream layer and some went all the way to the bottom. This wouldn't have been bad IF I had started with a larger pan. But I didn't and now I was committed cause I had a baked cookie dough bottom layer. Sigh. The melted ice cream now threatened to overflow the top of the pan as my whipped topping made white peaks in the flood of chocolate. I did what was necessary. I lapped up the over flowing ice cream. This was totally ok as I was only serving this to my family and I have spit cleaned all of their faces at one time or another.
Finally, with my ice cream stable, the whip topping floats topped by more crushed Heath bar, it all went into the freezer.

And came out the next day looking like this.
Which isn't bad, but it isn't a "Pillsbury" picture is is? My oldest son said that while it was very good, it was also too much of a good thing requiring him to pace himself and eat it over a period of a couple hours. So, final opinion is I won't make this again. Too much work for what turned out to be an over the top (and not in a good way) end product. Plus it just wasn't the refreshing ice cream treat I thought it would turn out to be.

Here is another picture. That's the whole pan, after it froze. It looks good, but the cookie layer with the hot fudge that had sunk to it was too much. It would have been better without that.