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AOCooks; Afternoon Tea Delights with John Whaite

The phrase “better late than never” could not be more fitting. Way back at the end of April, I was invited to an event at Neff by Appliances Online; #AOCooks. The event was called Afternoon Tea Delights, and Great British Bake Off winner John Whaite was the delightful host for the afternoon.
I arrived at the Neff showroom and joined the other bloggers who were being shown all the amazing products Neff has to offer, including their innovative Slide & Hide oven. More about that later. After we had our fill of gazing longly at cookers, imaging how good they’d look in our dream kitchens, we were taken to a presentation room where we were given a small talk on the history of Neff and Appliances Online. For those of you who don’t know, Appliances Online is an online retailer for electrical appliances, whose customer service is highly rated! Check out their blog to find out more about the afternoon and what the company do!

Then came the exciting part, meeting John Whaite! As a Great British Bake of fan I was very excited to see him bake, up close! The centre of attention of the afternoon, apart from John of course, was the Slide & Hide oven. Now I can’t remember all the specifics (check out Neff’s website for more info) but I do know this; it’s got this great door that slides out the way and it does this fancy air circulating thing which means you can cook shtanky things with your sweet treats. Now you may be thinking “poppycock!” but I can confirm that it works! We blind tested two muffins, one lot that were cooked on their own, one lot that were cooked with some smoked salmon tartlets, and you honestly could not tell the difference! Not a trace of the fishy flavour was absorbed by the soft lemon & poppy seed muffins.

The key component to any afternoon tea is scones. Whether you say it scones as in stones, or, scones as in gongs, they still have to take centre stage! John shared with us his orange and cranberry sconelets recipe and gave us a few top tips for scone making. Now unfortunately I can’t find the piece of paper where I wrote his tips down, however I can share the recipe with you CLICK HERE  and if you follow this you can’t go wrong! Scones are quite straight forward to make. There’s not many ingredients and you can whip up a batch quicker than it will take you to drive to Waitrose, park the car, wander up and down the isles, contemplate getting that reduced pizza, pick up the pizza, get the scones, go put the pizza back, queue up to pay, forget where you parked and drive home.
Our lovely hosts had set up the table nicely for our afternoon tea, with really cute polka dot themed decorations. And the food! They had laid out quite a spread! There were little tartlets, sweet AND savoury sconelets, muffins and cake! And to go with the scones there was the classic clotted cream and jam, as well as two types of cream cheese for the savoury ones! I do love a good afternoon tea! Following the afternoon tea, we have a little Q & A session with John during which he told us about his new artisan chocolate venture; The Hungry Dog. Checkout his website for more info! He also told us a bit about his new cookbook John Whaite Bakes at Home, which I was lucky enough to get in my goody bag! It’s a great recipe book which I recommend to anyone who loves to bake. I love how the recipes are organised into occasions rather than types of baked goods.

All in all I had a really great afternoon. I left with a full stomach, a grin across my face (thanks to the goody bag) and the desire to have a kitchen of my own in which to fit a Neff Slide & Hide oven (it would be bought from ao.com of course!)
Before I go, check out these AMAZING stop motion animation videos Appliances Online make…

KB x

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