The gifts of sponge cake and kind intent

In our cafeteria, we have a group of four cooks from Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan who are trying to figure out how to feed our peculiarly diverse campus population. My favorite cook is a 19-year-old baker from Pakistan who was brought here to work. I admire the courage it takes for someone his age to pack up and move to a place where he has no roots or friends to cook in a kitchen where he shares a language and culture with no one--except the other Pakistani cook. I have tried to be cordial and strike up a conversation whenever I encounter him as I can't imagine his experience is an entirely pleasant one. I even smuggled one of our campus orientation T-shirts to him as a token of my appreciation for his efforts in the kitchen.

In return, he smuggles a dessert to me each lunch time, because dessert isn't on the menu for the midday meal. He doesn't realize I am not supposed to eat desserts, so I always end up giving my treat to one of the sugar-loving students I am sharing a meal with on any given day. I admit, I always tell a white lie when he approaches me later, when I tell him how great his treat was. I guess it's really not a lie, as the students who get my desserts always seem to enjoy them.

Recently this was the dessert he secretly put on my tray as I went through the lunch line.

I checked my watch just to make sure it wasn't the first of April. "Hmm, maybe it's a type of sponge cake I am not familiar with?" I wondered as I contemplated the confection perched upon my lunch tray. I felt my friendly baker deserved points for realism, as the dessert resembled a dish sponge more than any sponge cake I had ever previously encountered, but it was the yellowish part of the dessert that was a bit more enigmatic. "What flavor do you think it is?" one of my co-workers asked.  Egg yolk, banana, and extreme vanilla were the guesses that were generated.

For the first time ever, none of my fellow diners was willing to take me up on my kind and generous offer to take my dessert off my hands. Soon my dining companions left the table leaving me to ponder the sugar bbs that seemed to be staring at me like the steely eyes of a creature from a science fiction movie.

After I put my tray away at the cleaning station, the young baker came up to me as I tried to escape from the cafeteria without having to render my customarily positive judgment upon his dessert. "Never before have I had such a colorful and intriguing dessert," was the best that I could do. He smiled broadly. I think his first language is Urdu and his smile was based more on my enthusiastic tone of voice and positive demeanor than upon the exact meaning of my words. Maybe I am wrong for thinking the world is a better place when kindness and gentle misdirection prevail over stark, unvarnished truth in matters not involving life and death, or righting wrongs, or providing for those without.

I still receive lovely lunchtime desserts that I never eat. And they are uniformly wonderful, outside of the one featured here, happily consumed by those who sit near me. Most important of all, I have come to realize that the kind daily act of a young baker, even when it is an uneaten piece of renegade sponge cake, leaves me with a sweeter taste and pleases my soul more than the most delicious creation a Parisian confectioner could ever make.