Angel delight cheesecake wtf?

[Angeldelightcheesefreak]

Very possibly BU with staff pressures, lack of funding etc but Dd yesterday was excited to be making cheesecake in technology at school. We love cheesecake so all good. The ingredients are provided for them. She came home and it's a digestive biscuit base, very thick, with a layer of chocolate angel delight mixed with cream cheese on top. It's tasty in an emergency food kind of way but cheesecake it is not.
Should schools not be teaching the children how to actually cook and to use proper ingredients for things? Luckily dd knows how to make a proper cheesecake and comes from a family of good cooks and bakers but others will think this is what cheesecake should be like and won't have the benefit of culinary knowledge at home. Why can't they teach proper dishes and techniques? Ok year 7 isn't cordon bleu but come on, angel delight cheesecake ffs. It's an abomination and an insult to cheesecake. I might make one of my chocolate cheesecakes and send it in to the teacher along with the recipe to show him or her what a cheesecake actually is. And don't get me started on the use of take away style plastic pots and cardboard boxes to bring things home in.

So far dd has made pineapple upside down cake-all good. Apple tart using ready made pastry-not good. And the angel delight abomination. Oh and some couscous.

Yes ok IABU, teachers, stress, budgets, Tory governments yada yada. And maybe I'm
A food snob 🤷🏼‍♀️

Please share with me your child's school food tech abominations. Please note I don't mean if your child has made a mess of the recipe but rather that the school has given them a shit recipe for bastardised dishes.

I feel better for that

I think I'd just be grateful they're allowed to have cooking lessons at the moment, even if it's not exactly authentic.

Ex Home Economics teacher here - yes, the curriculum needs a revamp - it was the introduction of 'food.techology' that reduced lessons to biscuits and pizzas. I think it is great that the ingredients are provided. The cheesecake will have been used to teach lots of other bits of knowledge and skills. I hope you were joking about sending a recipe and 'proper' cheesecake into school but that's not even slightly funny. Finally definitely has to be butterscotch.

Banana Angel Delight cheesecake is the the best cheesecake I have ever eaten. Absolutely gorgeous!

Oh my god I want to make some now! Not made it for a few months!

It used to annoy me that the school couldn’t invest in a couple of bottles of cooking oil so ingredients that had to come from home always included things like ‘60mls olive oil’ and ‘a pinch of salt and pepper’ ‘1tsp cinnamon’ etc. Was really cross the day they made chicken burgers. Sent 2 chicken breasts into school and all the rest of it. End result - not enough time to cook them thoroughly so one chicken breast made into inedible burger - binned as still raw, other chicken breast just binned. What a waste.

I have an overwhelming craving for pink Angel Delight now, having not eaten it since childhood

@goose1964

The only downside of this is that it was chocolate Angel Delight, everyone knows butterscotch is the best. It's a non scary way of learning to cook

My DH reckons banana is the best. He'll have strawberry at a push.

Sooooo….could you ask your dd- do you make up the angel delight with milk then fold in the cream cheese? Or make it up with cheese instead of milk? Asking for a “friend” tia!

Pointing out that angel delight slopped onto a base of digestives and butter is not cheesecake does not make you a "food snob". Jeezo.

It's not a cheesecake. Baked or set cheesecake contains, well, cheese. And this doesn't. It's a moussey, biscuity, quick and easy dessert, which is fine. But it's not cooking and it's not cheesecake.

I have a child of a similar age although in Scotland, this last year in food tech he has not had as much practical cooking as his sister at a similar age due to Covid and being off school. But they have made lentil soup, pizza (bread mix for base, they made the sauce and chose toppings), apple crumble, fairy cakes and a tuna pasta dish.

Nothing fancy, nothing cordon bleu, but basic cooking. Once you've learned how to make a bread base and pizza sauce, you can adapt in many ways. Same as the crumble and the pasta. I do understand the time restrictions of 45 minutes - 1 hour but come on. Mixing up a packet of angel delight and crushing up biscuits is not "cooking".

Butterscotch forever.

I knew someone who swore her cookery lessons at school included shepherd's pie made from a packet of Smash and a tin of Tyne Brand mince. This would have been in about 1972.

That sounds like a fairly standard no bake cheesecake, we make one very similar but with cream rather than angel delight. We have egg allergies in the family so baked ones are generally ruled out.

My DCs’ school seems to want to make everything into a healthy recipe.

So flapjacks. With so little butter and syrup that they were dry and crumbly, and inedible (which for my DD is unheard of!!). Wasn’t just DD, all my friends report the same dire results from their kids!

And pasta bake, which meant me trawling around the shops the night before (thanks DD!) for tuna, sweetcorn, pastas etc and then ended up with no seasoning, again dry and tasteless. I’d rather they make an easy but edible recipe like I do using a tin of soup as the sauce rather than passata which needs added flavour to make it into a decent tomato sauce.

And a scone based pizza, which DD made successfully at her pre-school cooking classes aged 4 but managed to make - you guessed it - dry, crumbly and inedible aged 14, as the ratio of butter to flour was never going to make a useful or tasty pizza base.

I’d welcome an angel delight cheesecake at this point rather than throwing another £5 worth of ingredients in the bin!

Pizza made from pitta bread topped with a thick layer of concentrated tomato puree is even worse.

I helped for a very basic cooking course. It was basically getting people to read the instructions on the packaging and understand what the instructions meant. We were at the person's home and it was based on what they would actually eat and what they could actually manage to do.

I was shocked at how incapable many people were. Too many people were functionally illiterate and couldn't follow the simple instructions on ready meals, frozen foods or canned and dried foods.

@VeganVeal

Yes you sound like a food snob

She really does not!

In my cookery class I make a beef Wellington type dish. In his, ds made noodles and veg - lovely, a pasta meal - very nice. Something which has baked beans in - awful.

It does look good:

www.delish.com/uk/cooking/recipes/a30440162/angel-delight-cheesecake/

@Roomba

I have an overwhelming craving for pink Angel Delight now, having not eaten it since childhood

It’s not the same Roomba . I used to love the butterscotch version but having bought one recently it tastes nothing like I remember it! On the plus side I have made something very similar myself using fresh cream, homemade custard and caramel which is probably 10 times more calorific than the sugar they’ve removed from the original

I think this is some sort of 70s 80s thing my mum makes a version similarly.

But. On the flipside cheesecake isn't really a useful recipe for learning to cook at all. Whatever era it's from.

I think the fact they’re in the kitchens and making food is enough of a start point to my mind. They don’t need to be making full roast dinners or puff pastry from scratch.

My Y7 has just started food tech and has made chicken goujons, french bread pizza, carrot muffins and pasta salad. She doesn’t eat what she’s made because she’s a picky sod but she’s LOVED doing it and it’s made her really enthusiastic about cooking which she’s never been before. She’s also asked to bake twice at home and made really nice brownies as a result. So while school cookery lessons might be basic, they’re not necessarily useless. Oh, and she was always scared of using the oven before but now she’s confident so I’m not going to criticise these lessons, quite the opposite.

My first Food Tech project as a kid was a sandwich. We had to design and make a sandwich. Then we did decorating a chocolate log- just decorating it, we had to bring in a plain shop-bought chocolate log. It continued in that vein.

Food tech isn't really about cooking, it's not home economics. It's about the processes of food preparation in industry. We learned about the processes of design, evaluation of food products, marketing, HACCP, food safety etc.

the lessons are 60 minutes.
in those 60 minutes the class will be getting ready, partnering up, the teacher will probably speak a bit...so its only around 45minutes absolutely not enough time to make pastry plus the pie as a learner?

@Borisjohnsonshairbrush

the lessons are 60 minutes. in those 60 minutes the class will be getting ready, partnering up, the teacher will probably speak a bit...so its only around 45minutes absolutely not enough time to make pastry plus the pie as a learner?

DT is usually a double lesson, isn't it? 120 minutes.

YABVU - Angel Delight has to be butterscotch or not at all!

1. Id prefer that to our school’s “please bring in half a teaspoon of these six expensive ingredients you’ll never use again” approach.

1. I want cheesecake now.

In conclusion: YABU

@RugratMum

no Mine was only 60mins, my dd's is only 60minssome schools may double lesson I don't know.....

When my kids started food tech in y7 they said that some kids had never turned on a hob or oven before so going from that to proper cooking might be a step too far.

Ds is doing Food Tech at GCSE and I am at some of his recipes but the lessons are not long enough to cook properly sometimes. (Washing up and Covid timetable eats into the actual cooking time )