Valerie and Courtney to battle Amy and Tyson in MKR grand final

Mother and daughter powerhouse Valerie and Courtney will face off against serious siblings Amy and Tyson on Sunday night's episode of My Kitchen Rules, battling it out to be crowned the winner of season eight and take home a $250,000 cash prize.

Tim and Kyle stepped into the semi-final with every reason to be confident. They sailed through the ultimate instant restaurant challenges and were able to spend time perfecting their cooking skills at home.

The meat and sauce boys were widely regarded as the best team in the competition. The stakes, too, were high: Tim quit his job in order to be on the show.

"You can always find another job, but you only get one shot at My Kitchen Rules," he told the camera.

Amy and Tyson, too, want the boys to win so they can have the "ultimate showdown" against the team they've been up against the whole season.

But Mumma V promises to not go down without a fight. And fight she does.

The mother and daughter team hope to wow the judges by cooking an entree of peppered chicken livers with fennel and tomato chutney. For main, they are cooking oxtail stew with pickled onion mash and eggplant kasundi. Drawing inspiration from Amy and Tyson's love of offal, perhaps?

Dessert - which has often been Valerie and Courtney's downfall - is cardamom dumplings with creme anglaise.

Tim and Kyle, meanwhile, stick to what they know by cooking scallops with celeriac and pancetta. Main is, of course, meat and some sort of sauce or puree - in this case confit duck with coffee pumpkin puree.

Dessert, which Tim has spent a lot of time perfecting, is a brownie with chocolate stout mousse.

Both teams suffer minor setbacks early on in the competition. Valerie and Courtney's pressure cooker decides to start exploding like an Icelandic geyser, spraying all the flavours they hope to pack into that oxtail all over the MKR set.

"If this isn't right, that's the dish gone," Valerie said.

???Tim and Kyle aren't without their own troubles. The pair don't start cooking their scallops (all 40 of them) until there's just five minutes left on the clock.

"My heart's racing now," Tim said. "There's no order - it's crazy."

The Adelaide boys finish their entree just in the nick of time, with Tim having to start plating before the scallops are even properly done.

At the judge's dinner table, the consensus seems to be that Tim and Kyle's entree was good but required more "oomph". Mumma V and Courtney's starter, meanwhile, is described as "fairytale" Indian food.

The boys redeem themselves with their main course, however, with their strange pumpkin-coffee concoction paying off. But they are quickly losing momentum, with Kyle burning himself several times and muttering under his breath.

Amy and Tyson, now the only team watching from the sidelines, are quick to spot the warning signs.

"Muttering under his breath, swearing at inanimate objects, jaw-clench: classic signs of the angry, angry man," Tyson said.

Perhaps this is why the boys make an amateur mistake when it comes to their dessert. Instead of making their own pretzel crumble, they simply crunch up pretzel's from the packet.

As the salty, crunchy biscuits are scattered over their beautiful dish, you can almost hear the Channel Seven producers packing the boys' bags.

"Why not make some sort of biscuit?" judge Liz Egan fumes at the dinner table. "Why not some sort of praline? Why not make something yourself?"

The minor slip-up proves fatal, with the boys snapping up a total score of 46. Valerie and Courtney, meanwhile, are rewarded for taking a risk and sail into the grand final with a score of 50.

Despite the result coming as a surprise to many MKR fans, one thing was always certain: that Tim and Kyle were going to have a graceful exit if ever the time came.

"It's still an achievement to finish third," Tim said, beaming like the gentleman he is. "We always knew it was going to be an extremely tough battle against these two."

The MKR grand final will air on Seven on Sunday, April 30 at 8pm.