Professional Standards
Tomorrow is my last day as Technology Learning Area Leader at St James College. When I started twelve years ago I was head of Information Technology. Then they made me Head of Technology. Which meant I was in charge of Woodwork and IT. Then they added Food Tech.
To make it feel more like a team, a few years ago I spent the year having Barry Wood (woodwork teacher extraordinaire) to teach all the Tech teachers some basic wood skills. My wood products were rubbish.
I wanted to thank my team for twelve years of Technology so I thought I would make cookies.
My wife pointed out the flaw in the plan. Food Tech teachers are built to critique food.
I am so glad that I am just an IT teacher next year.
I started with a recipe that asked for 4 oz of sugar, and 4 oz of butter, 8 oz of SR Flour and an egg. This led to a rabbit hole about what an oz is, and how butter and sugar can both be measured in ozzes. I went with one cup of flour, half a cup of sugar and 125g butter. The egg was easy. Let me know if I was very wrong.

I should have been worried when the dough stuck to the baking paper and my heads looked like Darth from his death scene.

But I was spurred on by the first batch. They came out nicely brown. The second batch went in…

I am not sure how I burnt two right in the middle. It seems implausible. But I had a few working pairs to turn into jam filled delights.

Oh but wait. I ran out of self raising flour. Online it says a cup of plain and two tsp of baking powder will get the same effect. The above picture gives lie to that statement.
With the ones that looked least deviant, I filled them with jam and then worked on the icing. Next problem: no icing sugar. But you can get icing sugar by blending caster sugar… not that it helped.

So now I need to take these in and hand them out to the staff, including the two Food Tech teachers.
I should have just bought chocolate from Haighs

It’s probably good that I am no longer head of two technology methods that I can’t do. Luckily I am good at the Digital Technologies side of things.