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 there is a middle ground between a rather crappy pudding and Master Chef - like how to prepare vegetables, make an omelette, soup, stir fry, a tomato sauce. Those could all be done in an hour

What about Apple pie, pineapple upside down cake and cous cous? Are they acceptable?

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

How long is the lesson? An hour?

Not really enough time to make pastry, or a 'proper' cheesecake...

An hour is plenty of time. You could make both, in an hour!

They’ve also got to tidy up and write an evaluation though.

It’s not the schools fault, if we had time & cooking skills they would learn all this at home.

You could make both in an hour if you're experienced. I think when you're explaining things to a whole class as you go along, when most won't have done it before, not all will be paying close attention and so on, which makes it more of a challenge.

How long are the lessons? How long does making your cheesecake take to make? That's probably the answer.

When the timetable is a nightmare I sometimes end up teaching ks3 food technology. It's really hard trying to find dishes that can be prepped, cooked and washed up (this bit should not be underestimated!) in less than an hour.

They're cooking a lot of sweet things at your dd's school! I think it's meant to be vastly savoury and teach healthy eating nowadays.

@claralara42 you could make both in an hour, I could make both in an hour. I couldn’t teach a class of teenagers do do both in an hour! Making a batch of simple sponge buns easily takes ab hour with a large group.

It's always been that way. School is not the place to learn to cook. In the 1070's we learned to make rock cakes, arrange a pretty salad in rows and how to set a tray for afternoon tea. All very far removed from the food actually eaten in our South London homes. 25 years later my D.C. all spent a happy double lesson icing and decorating a shop chocolate cake and that was called making a Yule log. And that was secondary school!

Both my DS had to make pizza in Food Tech using a box of pizza mix. I just thought how pointless, they may as well have just put tomato puree and cheese onto a pitta bread and left it at that!

@nonevernotever I wonder if we went to the same school? My mum was incensed too, and made me a swiss roll from scratch to take in.

It takes roughly:
5 mins to get them in and do the register.
5 mins to explain everything, read through the recipe. Highlight what not to do.
2 mins to get everyone's hands washed, aprons on.
10 minutes at least to clean up
They really should do some kind of evaluation. 5 mins.
Classes are often 5 mins late to arrive if they've been let out of the previous lesson late or coming from the other end of the school site.
Doesn't leave much time to cook!
Some students will have never been in a kitchen until food technology lessons, some will be confident cooks. You have to make it accessible to those with no prior knowledge.

I challenge any of you who say you could do it in an hour to gather up 20 11 and 12 year olds and give it a go. You can't leave the room in a mess as they'll be another class coming straight in after and you might be teaching over the other end of the school so need to leave bang on time. Oh, and throw in a 12 year old who has just had a fallout with her friend and needs comforting whilst you are in charge of making sure everyone else in the room isn't injuring themselves or randomly adding salt instead of sugar.

Apologies for typos

Seven201 nailed it unless you have been in a cookery class you have no idea the chaos and mayhem 😳

I forgot to mention that at least child won't speak English and there's no money left in the budget so you bought the Angel delight out of your own money

5 mins to get them in and do the register. plus 10 for SIMS or your user profile not firing up straight away because everybody else is on it at the same time
5 mins to explain everything, read through the recipe. Highlight what not to do. plus 5 to repeat yourself for those who weren't listening first time and 5 to explain it again to latecomers
2 mins to get everyone's hands washed, aprons on. plus five for the ones who have forgotten to bring their aprons and five for the ones who have forgotten to bring all the ingredients
10 minutes at least to clean up and five to tell the ones who aren't cleaning up to get on with it instead of goofing off whilst the other kids do all the work

All of which is also assuming that nobody suddenly feels sick, dizzy or otherwise unhappy at being in the hottest room in the school in summer.

My ds does GCSE and I noticed that next week's lesson involves fish pie mix for a fish pie. They covered making a roux when they made profiteroles so it's a bit disappointing.
It's a shame that the lesson isn't filleting a fish which is a high difficult technique so would help her higher marks in the exam but then again school knives aren't very sharp so from a safety view maybe not.
Not sure if veggie and vegan kids make an alternative for lessons like this 🤔

I remember my DDs Food Tech lessons (2010 onwards) involving making vegetable soup, fruit salad, spaghetti Bolognese from scratch. In one DDs class (Y7) the teacher held up a vegetable peeler and asked if anyone knew what it was. Two children did. In the other DDs class (Y8) there was a girl who came from a large family. She was often responsible for cooking the family meal (for 9 people). The class were flabbergasted at her speed, skill and efficiency. Such a range of experiences in the children in every class, and very often time constraints and lack of support for the subject from SLT as well.

@seven201

It takes roughly: 5 mins to get them in and do the register. 5 mins to explain everything, read through the recipe. Highlight what not to do. 2 mins to get everyone's hands washed, aprons on. 10 minutes at least to clean up They really should do some kind of evaluation. 5 mins. Classes are often 5 mins late to arrive if they've been let out of the previous lesson late or coming from the other end of the school site. Doesn't leave much time to cook! Some students will have never been in a kitchen until food technology lessons, some will be confident cooks. You have to make it accessible to those with no prior knowledge.

I challenge any of you who say you could do it in an hour to gather up 20 11 and 12 year olds and give it a go. You can't leave the room in a mess as they'll be another class coming straight in after and you might be teaching over the other end of the school so need to leave bang on time. Oh, and throw in a 12 year old who has just had a fallout with her friend and needs comforting whilst you are in charge of making sure everyone else in the room isn't injuring themselves or randomly adding salt instead of sugar.

And yet it used to work just fine when I was at school.

In one DDs class (Y7) the teacher held up a vegetable peeler and asked if anyone knew what it was

Y7. Is that about 12yo? (I'm not English).

I probably wouldn't have known what one was at that age either, despite having home cooked food every day. My mum used a knife to prep and peel veg. She used to work in a kitchen and prided herself on peeling the bare minimum off - which is why she never used a peeler.

@seven201

It takes roughly: 5 mins to get them in and do the register. 5 mins to explain everything, read through the recipe. Highlight what not to do. 2 mins to get everyone's hands washed, aprons on. 10 minutes at least to clean up They really should do some kind of evaluation. 5 mins. Classes are often 5 mins late to arrive if they've been let out of the previous lesson late or coming from the other end of the school site. Doesn't leave much time to cook! Some students will have never been in a kitchen until food technology lessons, some will be confident cooks. You have to make it accessible to those with no prior knowledge.

I challenge any of you who say you could do it in an hour to gather up 20 11 and 12 year olds and give it a go. You can't leave the room in a mess as they'll be another class coming straight in after and you might be teaching over the other end of the school so need to leave bang on time. Oh, and throw in a 12 year old who has just had a fallout with her friend and needs comforting whilst you are in charge of making sure everyone else in the room isn't injuring themselves or randomly adding salt instead of sugar.

I helped with a Christmas craft activity once. Eleven year olds, I couldn't believe how many times I had to say the same thing. I swear the kids at playgroup followed instructions better than the 11 year olds. In the end I couldn't figure out if they were really that bad or were they having me, and the teacher, on.

I think I'd have a breakdown with cookery.

By the way I did cookery at school in the 60s. We had 90 minutes and one week teacher did demo, we made notes, talk about nutritional value. Following week we did it. So 3 hrs to produce a batch of rock cakes.

An hour is plenty of time. You could make both, in an hour!

@claralara42. When was the last time you cooked both apple pie and cheese cake in an hour whilst first welcoming 30 people into your kitchen taking a register, getting all bags and coats where they need to be, getting all 30 pairs of hands washed and dried, had the 30 people watch a demonstration on a step by step basis, supported those 30 people to follow those steps etc etc etc all in the space of an hour knowing that once the bell rings, those 30 people have to be somewhere else?

@SoupDragon. And yet it used to work just fine when I was at school

Double lessons, probably on a rota with other arty type subjects - art, DT. The curriculum is so packed now getting a double lesson of anything is near on impossible in many schools.

DD came home with the most delicious apple and blackberry crumble from school yesterday, all made from scratch, a few weeks ago it was bacon and cheese scones - I will count myself lucky

(We do send in the ingredients at DD’s school, but it has rarely been anything I didn’t already have in the cupboard.)

@SoupDragon how long were your lessons? Some schools I've taught in it's 50mins. Where I am now is 60 mins which is quite the luxury. They get 17 lessons per academic year, some of which are theory. We don't get double periods in my school, not even for gcse classes, they get timetabled next to break or lunch so they can over run and no one gets a break. In the school I used to work in one boy stabbed another boy in the arm with a food knife as they'd had a falling out. I'm guessing that kind of behaviour wasn't going on in your lessons.

Our lessons were very civilised with no drama at all. Different schools and classes will all be, well, different, but there was no messing about when I was at school and if there was it I was unaware of it. School is a different kettle of fish in general now though and I don't envy teachers at all. Schools these days seem like Grange Hill, not that I was allowed to watch that but I managed to sneak a couple of episodes in at some point.

It's so sad to think that there are children who have parents who don't know how to cook so they aren't able to pass their knowledge on to their children. I learnt a lot from my mum over the years and now I teach her more fancy recipes as she is very traditional in her food tastes and cooking experience. Roast dinner is no problem but a basic pasta dish, no. She's in her 80s and pasta wasn't something she ever ate until she was in her 60s. Now though there's YouTube and online recipes with videos attached, so it's far easier to learn to cook than it was before when some cookery books didn't even have photos for every recipe, and you had no idea what it was supposed to look like. Celebrity chefs, countless cookery shows etc. The only thing is that a lot of them use expensive ingredients or those that most people probably don't have in their cupboards. That makes it inaccessible to some families. They should have a cookery show where basic, nutritious meals are cooked on a budget.

In one DDs class (Y7) the teacher held up a vegetable peeler and asked if anyone knew what it was

To be fair. The DCs probably wouldn't know what one looked like either. It's not that I don't cook from scratch often. It's just that I always used a good old fashioned knife for as a vegetable peeler. Does the job.

I was once supporting an ESOL learner in a Y8 cooking class. They were making something with chopped tomatoes and practically the whole class had to be shown how to use a tin opener.