Volunteer baker takes the cake

For years, Andy Tsang walked past the Margaret Tietz Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Jamaica on his way home. One day, he decided he wanted to “give something back” and walked in.
“He’s amazing,” said Linda Spiegel, director of public affairs for the center, which has about 200 residents. “He just walked in off the street and said he wanted to help.” Tsang offered to bake dessert and treats for the residents who attended the Mother’s Day luncheon at the center.
Tsang had been watching a cooking show on TV years ago, when he decided, “That’s what I want to do.” He enrolled in a Flushing cooking school and after graduation worked his way up, beginning as a helper in the kitchen of the Garden City Hotel.
“I saw all those old people at the Margaret Tietz Center and I guess they reminded me of my own parents,” he said.
Tsang’s Mother’s Day gift to the residents is a long way from making breakfast in bed for your mom. He appears at the non-kosher kitchen of the center at 164-11 Chapin Parkway, night after night after work, to prepare hundreds of sugar cookies and chocolate truffles which go into donated baskets for the tables.
The baskets, and a hundred corsages, are donated and prepared by volunteers from the Queens School for Career Development, a nearby special education school. “The student volunteers gain valuable experience,” Spiegel said, adding, “Some even become members of our staff.”
The pice de r/sistance of the day is a sheet-sized cheese cake on a fudge-brownie base, which Tsang decorates with sliced strawberries and chocolate frills. Expertly fashioning a piece of paper into a writing implement, he writes “Happy Mother’s Day” in the center, and makes little hearts and filigrees out of chocolate.
The project, all four nights of it, doesn’t faze him in the least. “I work for Donco International Airline Catering,” Tsang explained. “When it’s high season for international travel, this is dessert for one flight.”
After two years of volunteering, Tsang took a year off - to train in Paris and to get married - but returned this year. “I plan to be back next year,” he said.