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  • The end of the beginning

    Somewhere about 15, 16 years ago I walked my daughter into Reception for the first time, setting her on the path that would see her through Primary school, 2 Secondary schools, and on into Warsash Maritime Academy heading for the Merchant Navy. When we made those first steps I had no idea where she would end up, but I am so proud of where she is – and who she is.

    Today I walked my youngest son to school for the last day of Year 6, his final day in Primary school. Where his journey will end, I have no idea, but you can bet I’ll be proud of who he is, wherever he ends up. Hopefully! Come September he’ll start at Secondary school. He’ll be the first one to attend this particular school, but he’s going there with the friends he’s made throughout his time at Primary school. And he’s ready for it. We’ve got whole new systems of homework setting, parents’ evenings, the endless bombardment of school contact emails to learn and understand. And a head who’s very big on pastoral care – and who pronounces it correctly, none of this past-oral business!

    His primary school have been amazing. They’ve seen 4 of my 5 kids through from an assortment of entry points, but my youngest has had the full 7 year experience. And it’s been wonderful, even with lockdown and all of the pandemic weirdness thrown in.

    Robin Williams once said “You have two dreams about your kids. In one, they’re thanking the Nobel commission for awarding them this honour. In the other they’re asking you life’s eternal question – do you want fries with that?” I paraphrase, he tells it far better than I do. I talked to my lad about where he wants to be on our walk this morning. He wants to earn enough money to be happy. Not too much, because he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Enough to be happy.

    So. To everyone who’s finishing Primary school today, who knows where your journeys will end? Enjoy today, look forward to September where you’ll find excitement, adventure, and really wild things at Secondary school. And if it’s your last kid finishing today, this is just the end of the beginning. The end of the prologue. The main characters have been introduced, the scene has been set, the seeds of the story planted. But now, now the real fun begins.

  • Thank Crunchie it’s Cheesecake

    Thank Crunchie it’s Cheesecake

    Crunchies are one of those sweets that seem to have been around forever without changing. They’re still that gorgeous chocloate-coated honeycomb of burnt sugar and they’re still delicious. A friend has just had a birthday and wanted a Crunchie cheesecake…

    My flavour and ingredient guru was on the case instantly. Make a caramel, burn the sugar that way, let it set and blitz it down, there’s your flavour. Biscoff have the same flavour, so there’s your biscuit base. Milk chocolate ganache for the topping, mix in some bits of Crunchie and you’re golden.

    The Ingredients…

    Quick spin around the ingredients, Clive, then back to me.

    • 6oz Biscoff biscuits, blitzed to crumbs
    • 3oz melted butter
    • 680g full fat cream cheese
    • 320g Marscapone (these quantities are approximate, it’s 2 big packs of Philadelphia plus 1 Tesco Marscapone)
    • 9oz burnt sugar (apologies for mixing units of measurements!)
      • 9oz caster sugar into a dry, clean, frying pan. Cook it until it melts. The longer you cook it, the more colour it gets. Pour onto a non-stick baking sheet, allow to cool, then blitz it down to the same consistency as the caster sugar you started with).
    • 4 eggs
    • 300ml Sour Cream
    • 2 packs Crunchie Bites
    • 150ml double cream
    • 150g milk chocolate, smashed into little bits

    These are mostly the same as the Baked New York Cheesecake but with the above Crunchie-inspired tweaks… And, it turns out, that’s the Mark I recipe there so I need to update that.

    The Method

    Oven to 180°C, mix the Biscoff with the butter and put into the bottom of a 23cm spring-sided cheesecake tin. I believe they’re actually called cake tins, but they’ve got a dedicated purpose here. Bake for 10 minutes.

    Meanwhile, mix the cream cheese, Marscapone, and sugar together then beat in each egg until combined. Don’t over-work it, you’re just wanting to get everything mixed. With a big spatula, mix in the sour cream.

    Get a rolling pin and smash up the Crunchie Bites to make the lumps a bit smaller. Then stir that through. Should’ve taken you ~10 minutes, so take out the base, pour the mix into the tin, and put it back in the oven for the very specific time of 48 minutes. This time is the perfect time for the fan oven I’ve got, your mileage will vary. Experiment! Make a few! Find that sweet sweet spot and write it down somewhere safe.

    When the time is up, switch off the oven, open it a crack, then allow the cheesecake to cool in the oven. I’d say you’re looking at a good couple or three hours here.

    When you take the cheesecake out of the oven, run a knife around the edge to separate cheesecake from tin but don’t open the spring yet. Make your ganache.

    Heat the double cream until nearly boiling, remove from the heat and pour over the smashed chocolate. Whisk until smooth. Allow to cool a bit then pour over the top of the cheesecake.

    Now stick it in the fridge overnight.

    Et voila! Crunchie Cheesecake. You could, if you wanted to gild the lily, make some honeycomb and decorate the top with shards of the stuff.

    Thank Crunchie It’s Cheesecake

    I’m reliably informed that the sweetness of the milk chocolate ganache is the perfect foil for the not-too-sweet cheesecake filling and that it fit the brief perfectly.

    We’re now on the hunt for other ideas… There will be a coffee and wallnut cheesecake, probably later today, rum and raisin will happen in the future, as will mint-choc-chip. Snickers is too close to Mars Bar, and I’ve already done that. Twix is too simple. Oh, banoffee pie cheesecake is on the horizon as well. The thing is, once you’ve got the basic recipe, you can tweak and experiment to your heart’s content.

    Let me know how it goes, eh?

  • Penalties is no way to decide a match like that

    Full disclosure, I care very little for football. In fact, one of the earliest posts on this blog details the tricks you can employ in TweetDeck to remove all mention of the game from your feed in times of national obsession. What do you know, they still work!

    However, as The IT Crowd demonstrated, there are times when it is important to be able to hold your own in a conversation over a subject about which you have spent a long time cultivating ignorance. So, to aid my fellow geeks who have difficulty telling team sports apart (not helped by the fact that we’re being simultaneously bombarded by football, tennis, cycling, and the impending Olympics), I give you my phrase of the day and a nugget of insight that becoming a teacher has taught me.

    Penalties is no way to decide a match like that.

    Even I know that 1:1 is a draw. Either that or a certainty if you’re looking at probabilities. Or actual size, if it’s a measurement of scale. But in today’s conversations, more likely a draw. So that’s a close-fought match. According to the rules of the tournament as explained to me by my wife who had them explained to her by someone who understands these things, if it’s a draw after 90 minutes (which is a long time to be running around after a ball even if that is all you’re paid to do, and even though you do get a sit down and an orange at half time) it goes to extra time. Another half an hour. That’s 2 hours running around after a ball. In my heyday I could do a half-marathon in 2 hours, so these guys are doing more than that, I suspect. That wiped me out for days! If it’s still a draw after that it goes to 1d6 penalties. Unclear whether it’s 5 or 3 and, strangely, the rules as written don’t make it any clearer! (Top tip! If you’re going to search up stuff you wouldn’t want to influence your next search, use DuckDuckGo or Qwant). And finally, after that if it’s still a draw, then you get some form of sudden death thingy where they add Total Wipeout obstacles to the field, or throw in a muiltiball bonus, or something like that.

    So, in a nutshell, if you’re tied after 120 minutes, it ceases to be a team game and becomes 1v1. And that, in my Star Trek is better than Star Wars opinion, is why penalties is no way to decide a match like this.

    We should be proud of our national team, win or lose

    Again, I know little of these things but a team made up of the best players eligible to represent England (not Great Britain, not the UK, just England) reached the final of a major competition. That’s a pretty decent performance. And the man in charge looks professional and, according to TES articles, is a decent bloke with good ideas we can adopt in the classroom. Anyone using sport as a reason to be racist, destructive, or generally an unpleasant human being is consuming oxygen they really don’t need to. Someone put a call in for the Inquisitor to have them replaced. Actually, anyone using anything as a reason for the above needs to be replaced.

    It’s a great learning opportunity – it shows you can try your absolute hardest and still not win. It’s a valuable lesson for many in accepting defeat graciously, acknowledging a battle well fought, and as Kipling put it, meeting Triumph and Disaster and treating those two impostors just the same (I paraphrase. If is really rather wonderful).

    I am an outlier

    In teaching, we strive to teach to the top of the class and differentiate to make sure the rest can rise to the challenge. A rising tide lifts all boats and all that. Often, though, you find yourself teaching for the majority of the class and adding additional stretch and challenge for the outliers. The majority of the country appear to have some fondness for this game, it brings them (mostly) pleasure as long as their side wins. It’s people like me who spent the first part of yesterday’s match time watching Good Omens again and the rest of it in bed reading, only finding out the score this morning, who are the outliers.

    We’re the unusual ones! The ones who get nothing from “the beautiful game”. Hell, there are going to be jokes in Unseen Academicals that I’ll never get, and that makes me somewhat sad. I mean, I get most of the musical references in Soul Music, the movie references in Moving Pictures, but there are going to be football references in Unseen Academicals going straight over my head, no matter how good my reflexes are.

    Now I suspect I will never understand fully why teams playing sports brings so much to so many people, but that’s alright. It’s knowing that it does that’s important. It’s recognising that this is their Doctor Who, their Star Trek, their Ministerio del Tiempo, and joining in their happiness. They’re geeks! Just like me. Only their chosen geek topic is different to mine. And that, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, and when all 120 minutes have been played in a game of two halves and a few other bits, is okay.

    Penalties is still a rubbish way to settle the competition, though.