I honestly didn't intend for my suggestion to be useless, and I'm sorry you viewed it as such. I've found the #mojo channel to be the "where to go for Mojolicious answers" place, and since I saw that you hadn't received an answer here, suggested it in a hope that you would get your answer somewhere. Another option is the Mojolicious email list, which also tends to get answers pretty quickly. Both of those places are frequented by the Mojolicious development team. I don't recall seeing the Mojolicious development team replying to questions here at the Monastery. Wouldn't you agree that it's helpful to know where the core developers are providing authoritative answers?

If you prefer not to receive such help I'll try to remember in the future, though I tend to forget rudeness pretty quickly -- those sorts of people come and go too frequently, and rarely contribute anything interesting or positively memorable.

The obvious solution is to use '..' in path like:
$self->stash(layout => '../path/to/layout');
But IMHO better way is to use $self->stash(extends => 'path/to/layout');