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 this is quite sad. I came from a home with a very limited cooking repertoire and absolutely soaked up the cooking skills we learned in school. But I suppose it’s all available on you tube now for anyone who wants to learn.

@ILikePizzaAndWine

Back in the 70s i didnt get to do cooking until 3rd and 4th year (year 9 and 10) then it was only 1 term a year. Cooking took 3 weeks to make one item, we virtually did no cooking

I'm just jealous of everyone who can eat this, it sounds lovely. Curse my guts.

I remember well Mrs Spanton c.1984 teaching us how to butter toast correctly.

Ds had to make macaroni cheese a while back. The recipe told him to put the milk, butter and flour in the saucepan at the same time. We were doing it at home though so I poked him gently toward a different method.

@oooff

Ds had to make macaroni cheese a while back. The recipe told him to put the milk, butter and flour in the saucepan at the same time. We were doing it at home though so I poked him gently toward a different method.

You can do it that way - you just need to keep a Very Close Eye on it.

@WaltzingToWalsingham

With regard to the ready-made pastry, it's lack of time. In a one-hour lesson, they have to fit in a demonstration and explanation of the techniques required, the actual making and cooking of the dish, and then washing up afterwards. Corners have to be cut just to fit it all in.

Fair comment but actually not what the teacher told me. She assured me there will be pastry next term

Sounds better than what I made in food tech 11/12 years ago - we made beans on toast and a jacket potato 😂

Sounds delish and I'd eat it!
But I get your point.
Having had the crappest of cookery lessons at school I really resist the idea that they're a panacea to our public health obesity crisis. I

When my DSs did food tech at school they had to provide the ingredients so if school are supplying ingredients times 30 for however many classes I'm not surprised if they are cutting corners with budgets and "yada yada" as you put it. I'm also amazed that they are providing anything at all to bring food home in!

I want Angel delight cheesecake now 😋

My dad made a chicken korma with a chicken breast, some korma paste and a full sized bounty bar at school.
I have no idea what they were thinking.

Yanbu. If they don't have time to teach them how to make dishes they should teach them techniques so they can try cooking at home.

Oh I agree OP, and no you're not a food snob.
At a London comp' in the 80's, we made soup (leek and potato), bread, sotch eggs (I remember someone's exploding) and Swiss rolls, cheese scones., oh, masses of stuff. There was more I'm sure. It was in 'Home Economics' as it was called.. We also learnt the meaning of laundry labels and how to remove stains etc, the wiring in a plug... All sorts.
All v useful and gave us all a practical competence and confidence that's hard to find in other ways.

How do you butter toast correctly, @Bovrilly?

My first cookery lesson was cucumber sandwiches. I had long been a fan of cucumber sandwiches, which to me meant slice cucumber, put between slices of bread, eat and hope nothing falls out.

This involved buttering the bread finely, evenly and right up to the edges, peeling the cucumber and slicing it finely and evenly, then arranging overlapping slices carefully on each bottom slice of bread so there were no cucumber gaps, nor a very uneven height, then a light sprinkle of salt, before carefully placing the top slice of bread, cutting off all the crusts and then cutting the mega sandwich into four neat triangles. (I think we may have been told when to do triangles and when to do rectangles, but my memory is a bit vague there.) They were jolly good cucumber sandwiches, but it's a rare even that I can be arsed to go to that much effort. Nonetheless, I have very clear memories of that lesson; it made a deep impression on me.

And then we had to wash up in the right order - glass, cutlery, non-greasy, greasy. From that point to the end of her life, it pained me that my mother was never so organised about washing up (though not to the point that I actually told her or volunteered to do all the washing up.) My cousin, who is older than I am and more fussy about washing up, and was less scared of my mother, refused to let my mother do the washing up when they had meals together, as my mother didn't do it in an organised way.

I make a no bake cheesecake with mascarpone cheese, lime juice and sugar, with biscuit base. Doesn't sound too different from the one made here apart from the flavouring.

Hope people aren't secretly turning up their nose at my cheesecake because it is not a proper baked one.

I would prefer butterscotch Angel delight to the chocolate version, although I think most of the evil ingredients have been taken out of it now and it doesn't taste as delicious as the ones in my childhood

I agree they should be teaching kids how to cook healthy food from scratch. No point learning how to make angel delight cheesecake when you can’t boil an egg for example.

Urgh I have very awful childhood memories from eating Raspberry Angel Delight and vomiting all night, would never of thought about putting it on a cheesecake

My aunt often recalls the tale of her rage when my cousin was instructed to take a packet cake mix into her school for her cookery lessons, this would have been at some time in the 80's I think, she sent her in with eggs, flour, sugar and butter instead!

I was at secondary school in the 90's and remember bringing home some truly awful creations at times, for example we made quiche a few times but were never taught to blind bake the pastry so they were all soggy and disgusting and no one would eat them, we had to take our own ingredients in too! I suppose the lessons were only an hour long with about 30 kids in the class and one teacher trying to help everyone. When I chose to do food tech as a GCSE we got 2hr lessons which were better, but I really learnt most of my cooking with parents/grandparents and then got better by watching cooking shows and trying new recipes etc.

@Bovrilly

I remember well Mrs Spanton c.1984 teaching us how to butter toast correctly.

Didn’t Nigella do that recently?

I remember learning how to make puff pastry, scones, chicken casserole and (vile) banana custard, amongst other things, back in the good old 80s. I don't think we used any packet ingredients.

I make a no bake cheesecake with mascarpone cheese, lime juice and sugar, with biscuit base. Doesn't sound too different from the one made here apart from the flavouring.

I do similar, too - one tub mascarpone, 1 tub ricotta. Originally got it off a Sainsbury leaflet when I was at uni, I think, but have adapted and refined it over the years, and used other flavours.

We definitely learnt blind baking at school, because they had a massive jar of ceramic baking beans for us all to use, which was well posh compared with what we had at home.

My sister’s food tech teacher once taught their class to make sausage rolls by just putting sausages into puff pastry and rolling it up because ‘the skin just dissolves’

@oooff

Ds had to make macaroni cheese a while back. The recipe told him to put the milk, butter and flour in the saucepan at the same time. We were doing it at home though so I poked him gently toward a different method.

I se the all in one method, @oooff, and it works like a dream. Bung it all in, and whisk as it heats up, until it thickens. It really is a perfectly acceptable method to make a white sauce. Dh does it the ‘proper’ way and makes a roux, but there is genuinely no difference in taste, quality or consistency between his cheese sauce and mine.

I don’t even measure the ingredients - I do it by eye now.

@IHaveBrilloHair

I'm 43 and I remember one of our lessons was to make a sandwich

My first 'cookery' lesson was in year 6 or 7, in middle school, and it was to make buttered toast (under a grill rather than toaster) and either a milky hot chocolate or coffee - basically boiling some milk in a pan without it sticking/burning was the aim I suspect.

Least they made something and you also have all the ingredients provided. Some of DD's cookery lessons used to cost a small fortune.

Ready made pastry would be the norm for most school based cookery lessons.
Not everyone makes good pastry - even a few people who claim they can in my experience! Many TV celebrity chefs/cooks recommend a good ready made pastry rather than making your own, unless you are particularly good at it.