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

My kids have made proper food, I think it may be down to the teacher.

Sounds yummy OP. Angel delight, crushed digestives, chopped bananas - the 'cheesecake' I ate in the 80s!

Ds has made rough puff and shortcrust pastry but the pastry ends up being one lesson then making the whole recipe is continued at the next lesson.

Butterscotch it must be. I don't have any cream cheese or digestives in, though.

I think it can be useful to learn how to use packet and tinned food in creative ways, but ideally that should be alongside how to do things from scratch, which would be asking a lot from the syllabus and limited time.

Basic methods, though - what does it mean to beat an egg, how is that different from whisking egg whites? What does it mean if a recipe tells you to brown off the mince? What is simmering or a rolling boil? What's the difference between using cups vs grammes? How do you adjust volumes for more or fewer people than the recipe says it serves? etc...

You lost me at ready made pastry-not good.

I did food tech in the nineties, it was shit. I didn't learn to cook anything, spent a long time designing packaging for a pizza though

I think this is a cheesecake, isn't it? Not all cheesecakes are baked, some are just cream cheese + flavour on a base, and they are still cheesecakes to me. Maybe the flavour comes from lemon juice, maybe chocolate, maybe Angel Delight.

I'm not really a fan of ready made pastry but lots of people use it and it's a handy way of making things in pastry cases without having to wait for the pastry to chill.

@JeanClaudeVanDammit

Nothing wrong with ready made pastry, that’s teaching them to live in the real world. You’re not wrong about the cheesecake though, it should at least contain cheese.

It does have cheese in!

I'm with your OP.

Nice or otherwise, it's not really in the spirit of food tech to mix up a packet of artificial stuff. That's teaching nothing about food really.
Isn't it meant to be learning about ingredients, preparing rounded meals, safe food prep in the kitchen?

My son made soup (lovely), stir fry (also lovely), sausage rolls (not lovely).

It's not a cheesecake. Baked or set cheesecake contains, well, cheese. And this doesn't.

It has cheese in it according to the OP and is therefore a cheesecake.

Sounds pretty vile to be fair, but probably a casualty of not being able to use gelatin.

Below is what the internet says. I would bet a bag of Maltesers, mixing a packet of Angel Delight does not meet any of those learning outcomes.

Learning outcomes overview

Through this scheme of work, pupils will:

• Recall and apply the principles of The Eatwell Guide and the 8 tips for healthy eating, to their own diet;

• Demonstrate a range of food preparation and cooking techniques;

• Adapt and follow recipes using appropriate ingredients and equipment to prepare and cook a range of dishes;

• Recall and apply the principles of food safety and hygiene;

• Identify how and why people make different food and drink choices;

• Demonstrate the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in an iterative process of designing and making;

• Be given regular opportunities to demonstrate and apply their knowledge and understanding of food science;

• Be given regular opportunities to consolidate their literacy and numeracy skills by using them purposefully in order to learn

The ingredients for a ‘proper cheesecake’ can cost upto and above £20. If all the parents had to pay this, there would also be outrage. The cheaper option is more inclusive.

Maybe the children will grow up fondly remembering this as a cheap little food treat when they are grown up, and possibly struggling for money?

You need to get a grip. Have my first

Biscuit base and cream cheese mixed with another ingredient counts as a no bake cheesecake to me! I used to work as an ASN in a cookery class assisting a child with learning difficulties in a mainstream school there isn't enough time to make complicated recipes sorry OP YABU

@RestingPandaFace

Sounds pretty vile to be fair, but probably a casualty of not being able to use gelatin.

I've never used gelatin in a cheese cake. Ones which are whipped and set in fridge will set.

@Bluntness100

Why don’t you teach your kid to cook if you’re such a snob and then the school lessons become irrelevant?

OP has stated she will teach her kid to cook, she's talking about the kids who's parents can't/won't, those are the kids that need the lessons to be worth while....

@Bovrilly

It's not a cheesecake. Baked or set cheesecake contains, well, cheese. And this doesn't.

It has cheese in it according to the OP and is therefore a cheesecake.

Missed that. So it's angel delight mixed with cream cheese?

as toppings go, that's probably not far off what you'd find in a standard cheesecake recipe - eggs, cream, cream cheese, sugar, fruit/flavouring.

It's all the extra artificial crap i'd be less keen on.

It's not a cheesecake. Baked or set cheesecake contains, well, cheese. And this doesn't.

Apart from the cream cheese, obviously

Xpost :)

As an aside, I make a superb dessert by melting dark chocolate and marscapone cheese together. Some of it makes it to little pots to set.

@RestingPandaFace

Sounds pretty vile to be fair, but probably a casualty of not being able to use gelatin.

I don't think i've ever put gelatin in a set cheesecake. The filling is usually cream, sugar, cream cheese. Fruit, chocolate whatever for flavour.

”But that's the problem. Many kids will have parents that do this, mine does. But the children with parents who don't, who already eat ready made all the time, everything is packets, don't. Those are the children who actually need to learn it and can't, because no one teaches them.”

I agree completely, @MrsTerryPratchett.

Food technology needs to teach children the basic cookery terms and techniques - armed with this knowledge, they will be able to make use of the wealth of recipes that are available online and in print.

Yes, of course they could look things up, research each new term, technique or ingredient - but a busy, tired person, with enough else on their plate, may well not have the motivation to do the extra research, and could get put off trying something new and just default to ping meals or oven chips.

I don’t think this is the fault of the schools or the teachers - I suspect that the demands of the national curriculum, the pressure of core subjects on the time table reducing the time available for other subjects (food tech, design and tech, art, music etc), and the way that they food technology curriculum itself has been designed, are more to blame.

I remember making that exact cheese cake in food tech in the mid 2000s. My food tech classes were really hit and miss. Angel delight cheesecake and a stir fry were definite lows but learning how to make a genoise sponge cake was great. I don't eat meat anymore but the basic burger recipe we were taught ended up proving really useful in uni

Every single thing I cooked at school involved a tin of tomatoes, a block of warm sweaty cheese, and a white onion the size of the Death Star.

(recollections may vary)

In NI we have cheesecakes with no cheese of any description in them. They are pastry cases with a sort of sponge filling with jam in the middle. My mum made them all the time. It took me a while to get my head around the whole digestive biscuit/cream cheese concoction. Not particularly relevant to your AIBU, but worthy of note I reckon

Anyway, just be glad your DC is getting to cook or bake in school at all. There have been no practical lessons in my son's school. They were asked to make Easter nests during lockdown - cornflakes with melted chocolate/golden syrup etc. Not very complex. They also made champ, which at least involved boiling potatoes (very important obviously!) and combining with scallion infused milk/butter etc. Very nice it was too! I could make it in my sleep.

Angel Delight cheesecake? Oh, that sounds disgusting. 🤢

No wonder there are still lots of kids who leave school and haven’t the faintest idea of how to cook simple nourishing meals. I did cookery at school in the 70’s and we started by making a sandwich in the first lesson. I still remember getting marked down for writing ‘half fill a kettle with water’ for making the tea to accompany the sandwich. 🤣

Pastry’s not difficult to make, just takes a bit longer, but works out much cheaper than buying lots of ready made processed rubbish.

So they jazz up the title of the subject by calling it ‘Food Technology’ but then dumb down the content. Why bother pretending to teach it?