Chinese mid autumn festival - mooncakes and hot pot

Do you know about the Chinese mid autumn festival?

"The Mid-Autumn Festival is an official harvest festival celebrated by Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese peoples. The festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar and Vietnamese calendar, during a full moon, which is in September or early October in the Gregorian calendar, within 15 days of the autumnal equinox. The holiday is also celebrated in Korea [Chuseok] and Japan [Tsukimi]." - Wikipedia

Altough we are living in Germany, this year we also celebrated the mid autumn festival. My husband suggested we should invite some friends and make our own mooncakes (it's Chinese tradition to eat them with your close friends and family on mid autumn festival).

We got all the ingredients, but unfortunately it was impossible to find a mooncake former in our local Asian supermarkets. But you know what? It was even more fun without one! We planned to just make round cakes without a certain shape or extravagant pattern, but our friends were really creative as you can see!

I love this photo because it made me so happy to see our friends (who didn't even know each other before) were being so creative together, drawing cute patterns on the mooncakes and even even making them shaped like flowers!

This is what they looked like after frying them:

Sadly the patterns disappeared after frying, but hey, we knew they were there!

They didn't exactly taste like actual mooncakes, but they were still pretty good! haha

We made a red bean paste filling with several kinds of nuts. Some had egg yolk in them but I didn't like those. >_<

We also had mochis, look how cute they looked!

Altough the mochis on the second photo had an artificially sweet taste. -_-

In the evening the six of us went to Essen because there's a Chinese restaurant with hot pot buffet and oh god, we were eating so much!

Selca with my friend~ we look so pale, haha!

Today is her birthday, hope she'll have a lovely day! ^.^

After this huge dinner we all went home tired and full, it was a very nice day! We already have some plans for this week as well since today is our 5th wedding anniversary! Waaa 5 years already... time sure flies! It sure didn't feel like such a long time. To be honest we don't have certain plans for today yet. Xin has to work and I don't need to go eat at a fancy restaurant just for the sake of an anniversary. Especially since we already went out last weekend, and this week we'll also go out to celebrate my friend's and also Xin's birthday, so... As long as we'll have a comfy and romantic evening it doesn't matter to me if we eat KFC or at a fancy restaurant, haha~