Morning tea with Appliances Online plus Monday Morning Cooking Club plus Recipe!

If I ever needed a reason to praise this blogging caper, this would be it.

I was kindly invited by Carla  and Annabelle from Appliances Online to attend a pre-Mother’s Day morning tea and cooking demo at Appliances Online headquarters, with food by the Monday Morning Cooking Club.

MMCC is a group of ladies who have compiled a book of recipes and anecdotes inspired by their Jewish community. They have tested all the recipes and the lucky attendees of the morning tea got to watch them prepare some sweet treats. And sample them, too, of course.

Here are 3 members of MMCC: Lisa, Natanya and Merelyn demonstrate how to make almond kifli. To mix the pastry, they are using the Breville All-in-One as a sort of mini food processor.

These ladies are passionate about their food culture, honouring the traditional recipes and passing the knowledge on to their families, and now, us. I enjoy watching recipes being demonstrated, you get to pick up tips and stuff that you don’t always get from a cookbook.

Some of the beautiful morning tea: on a sunny balcony at the Appliances Online offices, we admired and ate gravalax and mini bagels, with a moreish egg and onion spread.

And chiffon cake. More on that later…

These are the 3 dishes made during the demo: light and crisp honey macadamia wafers, almond kifli, and kindlech, made from super-thin sour cream pastry rolled with Nutella, raspberry jam and sultanas. Kindlech is my new favourite pastry!

This is one of the 3 chiffon cakes they brought (orange, custard and chocolate versions). Gosh, these were as light as air and definitely well worth the effort needed to make them (I say ‘definitely’ because I will ‘definitely’ never be able to make one myself).

After enjoying the sunshine and the gorgeous food, we were presented with a copy of the Monday Morning Cooking Club book, and… a Breville All-in-One!  

Thanks to the following for a wonderful morning:

Appliances Online: The place for whitegoods and home appliances. Most recently, I bought a washer/dryer and microwave from them. Can recommend them for great prices and service.

Breville: Love the new All-in-One. Lots of power but compact, it also has its own stand for its attachments and is ideal when you don’t want to drag out your big food processor. And a great gift for Mother's Day...

Monday Morning Cooking Club: The MMCC cookbook is simply fab. So many dishes I want to make from it. Let’s start with something tasty….

Armed with a super-duper appliance and tried-and-true recipes, I decided to make peri-peri chicken livers with gnocchi. The ‘gnocchi’ recipe is actually for pelushki in the cookbook, but I omitted the usual onions that go in the dish and turned them into gnocchi.

Ingredients for the peri-peri sauce: peri-peri powder, paprika, chilli flakes, red wine, tomato sauce, onion. Peri-peri powder is a mix of cumin, turmeric, paprika, chilli, mustard, ginger, etc.

The sauce is simmered together, then the browned chicken livers are added.

Making the gnocchi (aka pelushki): mashed potato, flour and egg are rolled out and cut into small pillows. They do fluff up quite a bit when cooked, so make them smaller if you like.
And the brilliant Breville All-in-One even has a mashing attachment with THREE texture variations (finest setting was used for this mash)

The sauce and livers were amazing - sweet and rich. The perfect accompaniment to the light and soft gnocchi.