Yes, working with time zones is about the same fun as dealing with text translations 
I’m assuming you don’t have access to database configuration. This leaves either specifying which time zone to use for the INSERT or changing the returned result.
My server is 4 time zones away, and at first doing a simple “minus four hours” with PHP was usually good enough. One problem with this however, is dealing with “savings time” differences. Since then I have leaned more to using timezone names.
I have not done so, but AFAIK, MySQL has both “server” timezone (as set in the config) and “session” timezone (which falls back to using the server timezone as default if not specified).
So I think as long as the databases timezone table is good you could do a SET to specify a named timezone of your choice at the time you make the connection.