Terence,
Yes, that is exactly the solution. I didn’t do a head slap, though. I have looked at a ton of Studiopress tutorials/posts as well as Epik tutorials and forum entries and never seen this step mentioned. Maybe it is buried somewhere.
As I had quoted, directly from an Epik tutorial, the tutorial states, “the only thing you would need to do is add the html into your widget.” Those instructions are incorrect. If you load Genesis, load Epik, and the very next thing you try to do is “add html into your widget” it won’t work. They miss a critical step (the step that you didn’t miss!). You cannot add html into any of the epik widgets…like you mentioned, you must first drag a text widget atop the Epik widget.
Thanks for the help and the perfecto solution!