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

@Killahangilion

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?

They didn't dumb down the content so much as change the content. As a pp said it is about commercial/industry applications - so how you design, package and market the product - not about teaching you to cook.

Same as textiles is not just about sewing. You also do design, test fabrics for flammability and wear in the washing process etc

Design and tech these days is not the same as home ec in the 1970s. Now arguably there has been a loss of skills as a result of the change but I guess it was designed to make it so it had work application (design and tech) and get rid of the gender stereotype the girls learning to look after the home by having cooking and sewing lessons while the boys did the woodwork. Now everyone gets to do all the categories of DT.

@EBearhug - I STILL wash up following the same order as you've mentioned! It was drummed into me at school. This was the late sixties so very few packet convenience foods around. We had to make everything from scratch starting with Rock Buns and progressing to a Swiss Roll.
When we made an Apple Crumble we had to stew the apples and make the crumble. I too was horrified when my son had Food Technology lessons, the new name for Domestic Science and was told to bring in a tin of fruit pie filling and a ready mixed packet of crumble!

Just trying to work out what sort of emergency would call for Angel delight cheesecake.

I do quite want to try it now though (butterscotch, obvs). I wonder if op is a marketing agent for Angel delight.

Ooh I remember making a mousse cake at school . Cheesecake biscuit bottom with topping of whipped jelly and evaporated or condensed milk . Brilliant quick desert

Yes, like spag Bol old skool no bake cheesecake has loads of versions.

Mine is crushed digestives and melted butter base, filling is small tub philly cheese, small tub double cream, icing sugar and vanilla essence, then topped with very lightly poached raspberries drained and added just before serving. Served in small individual glasses for dessert as has a trillion calories.
Or sometimes do just do crushed ginger biscuits base and lemon posset type filing.

Not sure what point I’m trying to make tbh!

My preference would be for the children to learn to basic skills to make a meal - something cheap, simple and nutritious. I am always astonished at how many people I know genuinely can’t make a simple dinner like spaghetti bolognaise or a basic soup. In a ideal world I guess it would be great if they could learn to bake a cheesecake but I’d rather kids left school with these skills - not all parents teach this & I especially worry about kids in care who leave the system without basic knowledge of how to feed themselves.

We made supposed to make sausage rolls with puff pastry and skinned sausages - we had to remove the skins in the lesson.

I watched the demonstration we had in the previous lesson and decided there and then that I would be using sausage meat to save myself faffing about removing the skins. The teacher was really annoyed I'd changed the ingredients list myself despite her knowing my problems with using my hands too much.

Other great recipes we did included:- blancmange from a packet, jelly from a packet, cheese on toast/welsh rarebit. We did some proper stuff too with other teachers but this particular teacher was more focussed on us working efficiently in an organised way and then washing up correctly and putting everything away properly afterwards. I think I learned more from her about these aspects of cooking than actual cooking itself.

I suppose some people will benefit from knowing food hacks like that. But yes others would benefit from knowing that how to make your own pastry.

Back in the 90s I remember making a fruit salad and thinking it was ludicrous. We also made eggs mornay (awful), shepherds pie and I have found memories of decorating a trifle. We also spent weeks learning the correct order of washing up.

When I was at school we had 3 DT lessons a week (rotating through DT and art) and one lesson was for planning and then a double for doing the actual cooking.

We produced apple upside down cakes, pasta dishes, bread etc. One somewhat memorable lesson we had been sent home with a recipe for chocolate cake, which I wasn't convinced by. I substituted in the recipe we used at home but my cake came out twice the height of everyone else's so my sneaky change was quite obvious!!

@EBearhug
Corners and edges first, then the middle. Apparently it's to prevent there being a pool of butter in the middle with dry patches around the sides. (Who would do this though?!)

I just slather it on any old how but I can't forget Mrs Spanton and always make sure my corners and edges are well buttered. Annoying really, there are things I'd much prefer to remember. Mrs Spanton was not a nice person.

I burst out laughing at this comment!!! 🤣🤣

It is definitely offensive to call that a cheesecake. However it is more outrageous it wasn't in butterscotch flavour.

I have to agree. If they aren't going to teach children how to cook real food, they shouldn't bother at all. The time would be better spent on other life skills that aren't half-arsed.

Thank you. I rarely have toast (or any bread) these days, but I have been buttering it wrong all these years. I'm not actually seeing a pool of melted butter in the middle as a major flaw, mind you...

1st cookery lesson in 1983 - fish fingers in a cheese sauce.

My first cookery lesson at school was making a cup of coffee. We had to bring a teaspoon of instant coffee and 2 tablespoons of milk to school 🤣

Why not just teach them something simple like a tomato pasta sauce that can have cheese/tuna/strips of chicken added to it?

Much more nutritious.

@Angeldelightcheesefreak happy to taste test one of your chocolate cheesecakes

My friend teaches Home Ec and says for the junior years time and theory are huge problems. They have an hour to get in, get organised, do some sort of evidential writing (like copying the recipe or writing down how to do a technique) then they have to cook and clear up. So it's really a small amount of time to actually cook.

Mind you, YABVVVVU about shop-bought pastry - why wouldn't you?

^Son had to make apple pie at senior school. Was told to bring in a packet of ready rolled pastry and a tin of apple.
That was in a proper cookery lesson as well.^

It's to do with the time. Both DCs have to do this and bring prepared fruit veg and weighed out flour etc in food bags etc.

The tupperware stuff is because of covid. Recently DCs were told to bring in baking trays etc because of covid too. I'd personally think that was more risky than using school equipment as you can't trust everyone's hygiene levels to be to the same standard but that's just my opinion.

Home ec has been crap since the mid 70's I think..

No 'ec' at all, and the only 'home' bit is cooking ... things like fruit salad (chopping), pizza (spread things on a base, oven)...

I have a very vivid memory of trying to scrape the anchovies off a pizza, we'd been told we HAD to put anchovies on it, no idea why - however my mother REFUSED to send me to school with lunch money when I had a perfectly good pizza baked in my first lesson of the day sitting in the home ec pantry... so I was to eat that...

Only I wasn't allowed into the home ec room to get it, I couldn't have it til the end of the day.... So there it sat, forlorn, with smears of anchovy on it that'd scraped off literally seconds after it came out of the oven and been graded... whilst I starved all afternoon. Joy.

I learned FAR more at the 'young peoples housing link' where I lived for a bit (effectively homeless shelter for kids too old for care, too young to be set free into the wild)... they would give us a budget to to cook for a group meeting of around 6 residents, we'd plan it, shop for it and cook it.

We did pizza (one of the key workers would bring in dough made the night before), toasties, I did shepherds pie and also chilli... loads of stuff and far more practical, working out costings, portion sizes, cooking timings etc!

Not all kids get taught to cook at home. They've learnt a simple recipe they can recreate cheaply with few resources or skills. Sounds perfect to me.

We made some pretty simple things in Home Economics in the eighties - cheese and potato pie (just cheesy mash) and salad (just chopping and arranging things on a plate), soup (bung it in and blend it), omelettes/pancakes, before moving on to cookies, scones, gingerbread. I guess they were teaching us the very basics like using a potato peeler and masher, knife technique, using a blender, simple baking.

We did move on to more complex skills that covered most of the common techniques but they were still very basic recipes that we could make in an 70 min double lesson eg sausage rolls (puff pastry), jam tarts (shortcrust pastry), apple crumble (shortcrust pastry in another guise), macaroni cheese (roux), Chelsea buns/pizza (live yeast), Victoria sponge (creaming), chocolate mousse (whipping/bain marie), lemon meringue pie (meringues), toad in the hole (Yorkshire pudding). Plus cheesecake with kiwi fruit and strawberries. It was the eighties, kiwi fruit garnish was obligatory! We also made the mysterious peach cobbler.

I'm sure you could easily make some of those into a 60 minute class.

I learned proper cooking at school in the olden days, however I do remember my mum coming up with a concoction from a woman’s magazine which was a crushed biscuit base, cream cheese and dream topping which was a powdered artificial product, and then the whole thing topped with a can of fruit pie filling, black currant if I recall. What can I say, it was the 70s!

I'd actually fancy that. I fancy that now to be honest. I see what you mean though, but we made fruit salad in food technology and literally chopped fruit up and put it in a bowl, we also made cake with mix out of a bag once. So I see why you'd be miffed.

I learned to cook from home to be honest, best way if you can.