I am new to mac OS X and have only had mountain lion so i can not say much about the versions.
The picture below show the finder with favorites. What i did was to run the command to get the recent items folder in the dock, then right click on it and change it to favorite items (which seems to reflect the same as the finder has as favorites).
Ok, Favorites in your version is the same as Places in my version.
I'm not quite understanding what your second paragraph above is saying that you did, but I think I understand what it is that you want to do. That is, you'd like all the things in Favorites to be in a Folder (actually called a Stack) in the Dock. That's easy.
Make a folder on your Desktop called Favorites.
Find the original icon of each of the things under Favorites in your Sidebar*, highlight, and choose the Menu item File > Make Alias (or Command-L on your keyboard).
Drag the newly created alias to the Favorites Folder you placed on the Desktop.
Do this for each of the items you want quick access to.
Now drag the Favorites folder to the right side of the Dock.
I think this does what you want, but I don't really see a huge advantage to this over just using the Favorites list in the Sidebar. By the way, if you create those aliases and don't like the fact that they all have "alias" in the name, you can rename and remove that. This will not break the link to the original. It's like a "shortcut" in Windows, if that helps.
*One way to do that is double click it in the Sidebar, then go to the title bar at the top and right click on the name of that window, which allows you to move up to the folder that the icon is in. Now you can highlight the targeted item and do the above.
