TWD: GRANDMA'S ALL-OCCASION SUGAR COOKIES...with Watermelon sprinkles
That's right, watermelon sprinkles. Slightly bizarre. But let's go in order here.
First, the cookies. Fabulous and soft and buttery. I'm in the soft-sugar-cookies-rock camp so I agreed with Dorie that this makes an excellent basic sugar cookie.
Now for the sprinkles: These cookies are intended for holiday treat bags for co-workers and so a festive flair was needed. A trip to Publix revealed a ratio of approximately 10/1 of flavored sprinkles to regular sprinkles, and nothing in the holiday line. The pink and green just caught my eye and held on so there you go. The sprinkles taste like watermelon candy before baking but seem to lose a bit of their flavor afterwards. Or maybe the sugar cookies are just that good that the watermelon sprinkles cannot even compete for the taste buds' attention. Guess we'll never know.
These yummy shortbread cookies left my hands all buttery, smelling like a dairy farm or an expensive hand treatment, or both.
There is a lot of meat in Chinese cuisine, but also tofu, so as a pescetarian I didn't have any real difficulties...except in actually communicating "no meat please." The Lonely Planet food section was very helpful as I pointed to the Chinese characters for "I am a vegetarian" and "spicy tofu." Many Buddhist temples had vegetarian restaurants attached with lots of scruptious mock meat dishes and bean pastries. Some restaurants had menus in English although the descriptions themselves were sometimes confusing or vague. A lot of dishes simply said "meat," since the Chinese word for pork can also be used for meat in general. In addition, there was "fish like squirrell," in which the fishtail curled upwards to the ceiling (quite tasty).
I also loved the roasted chestnusts sold on every street corner. And the milk tea! And the little steamed baotze balls filled with cabbage or a darker, kale-like veggie! 
In Beijing, my sister and I found a night market with an entire street of food vendors lined up with fried noodles, fried ice cream, fried scorpion, fried beetles, fried centipede, fried starfish, fried dough, fried dumplings, fried rice, fried honeybees, and the list goes on. Yep, no oil spared here my friends. I partook of the fried ice cream and fried banana balls (which btw, contained absolutely no banana) while my more adventurous (and carnivore) sister nibbled on crunchy centipede and scorpion. Yes, many pictures were taken. 
Things I want to try:
I ran into a small dilemma when I went to steep the cranberries. I'd never before steeped dried fruit in alcohol and wanted some guidance on it. I googled and searched but found nothing. I tried to use what common sense I have and soaked the fruit in the sherry, then drained it. It added a lovely though strong sherry taste.
I made one layer of carrot cake and one recipe of cream cheese icing, and chilled the combined mixture for several hours before molding them into little cupcakes. Thankfully they didn't dry out a bit, but stayed very moist.
My plain cupcakes look a little like mushrooms. I molded them by pinching the base, but I think a tool would help a lot. I experimented with white and dark chocolate and caramel to cover the cakes. For the carrot cake, the white chocolate was definitley the best. It also formed the nicest coating.
