I guess it wasn't a complete disaster..I'm eating a leftover and it tastes wonderful...

I've made many a fondant cake for friends and family and they turn out great!! I have a lack of a talent with cupcakes it seems...

Made fudge brownie cupcakes with whipped ganache icing. Yesterday I piped the name "Mayah" in royal on wax paper and popped them off as usual. Decorated this morning and spelled out the name on top of my 1M swirls. So cute!

30 min later I turn around and to my HORROR the letters are melted and falling over onto the icing. I should have known. Fat based and sugar based dont like each other

Thought fast and made a batch of shortbread cookies, cut out mini heart cookies and piped Mayah on them. My friend who ordered them wasn't too thrilled...

I felt awkward taking her $...since it wasn't what she originally asked for...I did it b4 w/ whipped ganache and piped chocolate, so I naively assumed royal would work the same. She saw those and wanted the same but in pink. Should have done white choc letters...should I have offered her a discount? I already gave her 50% off what I normally would have charged ???

If you had charged her full price I would have offered her a discount, but since she already got 50% off that is enough of a discount! Things happen and as long as it looked nice I wouldn't worry about it. I would let her know that if she ever wants the same thing you will definitely use chocolate & this was an unforseen problem.

I would have given her the cookies for free if I hadn't done what was ordered. Cookies aren't that expensive, and it would've made for at least a 'sorry', and perhaps she took them because it was those or nothing at all.

That's just me. Not saying what you did was right or wrong..it's all subjective.
that stinks that it happened.

I agree with Renaejrk, if you already discounted it because she is a friend, that is enough. I had a friend's cake order (one of my very first ever) turn out "less moister" than she would have liked to use her words hehe (I was just starting out learning to bake all scratch cakes, moisture was an issue then! I tested the layers, they seemed fine to me) regardless, I only charged her for ingredients a total of $30 (it was a 10" whipped cream frosted topped with a custom character scene hand cut and painted of fondant from a photo she sent to me, took me hours to carve and paint!) and didn't offer her money back.

Sometimes, things happen and we have to improvise. For friends and family getting special pricing, I would hope they would be a little more forgiving. Such is the nature of the work!

I must be missing something here... The cupcakes were not ruined, it just messed up the ganache icing, right? Why not just re-ice them?

The RI melted because of the moisture content of the whipped ganache, not because of the fat content. Had they been iced in BC, the dried RI letters would not have melted.