Global volunteers come together to bake and learn with special needs students in Shanghai
Shot by Tang Dafei. Edited by Tang Dafei. Subtitles by Yang Yang and Zhong Youyang.
Volunteers and students from Huangpu Special Education Vocational School pose for a group photo after a charity baking class on Friday.
Monica Gabriela De Paúl Sales from El Salvador in Central America loved seeing the girls of Huangpu Special Education Vocational School help each other during Friday's baking course.
"They have pure hearts. They helped each other. One of the girls was trying to open one ingredient, and the other helped her," said De Paúl, an overseas student from Shanghai University.
She was among a group of foreign and Chinese volunteers who engaged themselves in Friday's charity baking course, organized by City News Service as its second volunteer activity this year following the Lantern Festival blood donation event on February 5.
Corentin Delcroix (second from left), an Internet celebrity French chef, helps students create lava chocolate cakes.
Ninety percent of the volunteers for Friday's event were expats, coming from El Salvador, Bangladesh, India and France.
Corentin Delcroix, a wanghong (Internet celebrity) French chef in China who now lives in Shanghai, worked as the tutor while having donated all the food materials and ingredients needed this time. The recipe he chose for the group of mentally challenged students, the lava chocolate cake, is a very common dessert in France.
"We eat a lot of it in France," said Delcroix who's better known in China for his Chinese name Guang Tan (广坦). "If you go to any French restaurant, you can find the dessert. It is also something very home-style in France, we do it at home. It's a big part of French culinary culture, so I want to come here and share the cake today."
Simple ingredients – eggs, chocolate, butter, flour, sugar, digestible flowers and fruits – were used. A full egg and a yolk were the recommended dose for making two cakes. They were beat down, then added with melted chocolate and butter. The mixed dense liquid was filled into molds through a pastry bag. The molds had been attached with some butter beforehand to make demolding easier. The cakes were then baked, demolded and finally plated.
From left: Abu Sayed from Bangladesh, Monica Gabriela De Paúl Sales from El Salvador and Corentin Delcroix from France help a student make chocolate cake.
Abu Sayed (right) from Bangladesh and Sajad Hussain from India give a hand at the baking course.
"(The students' performance is) much better than I had expected. Especially for the plating, I think they are very creative. Very nice plating with a lot of different ideas and styles. I think it's important they just didn't reproduce what I had shown them, but they put their thinking into the plating," said Delcroix.
Abu Sayed from Bangladesh and Sajad Hussain from India, who are studying for a aster's degree and a PhD in civil engineering respectively at Tongji University, joined the event.
The two, with another two Tongji University overseas students, had formed a City News Service running team for disability awareness and took part in the 5.4-kilometer Fun Run of the 2023 Run the Track activity in February.
"Back in my home country, I had worked for activities like this for special kids, so I feel so glad to come here," said Sayed.
A student creates her own lava chocolate cake.
By far City News Service has a total of 74 volunteers, and the majority of them are expats.
When they accomplished Friday's lava chocolate cakes with their own plating styles, the teens expressed gratitude to Delcroix with an earnest "Merci." Delcroix also sent his best wishes to them, so did De Paúl.
"I think they can still keep their happy and curious attitude they have today. They're happy to learn new things. So keep that positive attitude. Today they're very positive and optimistic. Just they can keep that attitude all the time," said Delcroix.
