After authoring books on beginners guide to baking and desserts for occasions, 26-year-old YouTuber Shivesh Bhatia’s latest project is for baking enthusiasts. His latest book, Eggless Baking With Shivesh, that released in 2022, offers options for those looking for eggless desserts, even in the baked variety.
Shivesh discovered his love for baking quite accidentally, at the age of 16yHe tasted success with his own creations bfter studying various recipes and ingredients, and conducting countless trials and errors. In Eggless Baking With Shivesh, he recreates classic desserts such as tarts, muffins and cheesecakes without using eggs. Shivesh says, “Be it a birthday cake, a pina colada tart for the adventurous, or simple oat and raisin cookies to accompany one’s evening tea, there is something for everyone. I have made everything very simple.”
No solo substitute
Shivesh points out in his book that one can’t simply take a recipe that contains eggs and blindly replace them with whatever is at hand or just skip them entirely. He explains “It doesn’t work like that. I have used commonly found egg substitutes in this book —like yogurt, flax seeds, aquafaba, buttermilk and apple sauce — and they work differently in different recipes. For instance, mashed bananas might be a great substitute for eggs in a cake, but try using them as a replacement in macarons and you’ll end up with a disaster! And while yogurt has become my go-to ingredient for eggless cakes, it just does not work in cookies; instead, a flax egg does the trick.
However, Shivesh clarifies that eggless baking was not how he grew up enjoying cakes. “Our birthday cakes were simple and baked at home by my nani (grandmother) or my mother. Even though I was never hands-on in the kitchen, I would observe their procedure, right from beating the eggs to finally cutting us a slice.”
Shivesh actually started baking after his nani stopped baking; he and his cousins missed her goodies. “That day, I found baking to be a beautiful experience. We used pre-mixes and stuff and the outcome wasn’t as good as nani’s, but I realised I can do it the way she did,” adds Shivesh, who also has to his credit Shivesh Bhatia’s Desserts for Every Mood: 100 Feel Good Recipes, (published in 2020).
Instead of falling back on recipe books and cookery shows, Shivesh wanted to learn baking the hard way, by “experimenting with measurements, ingredients and whatnot. At first, most of my bakes were misses but everyone encouraged me to keep trying. After several trials, when I got my pound cake right, I tried making cupcakes.”
The social media game
As he posted all his recipes – including all hits and misses – on social media, Shivesh steadily started gaining followers. After a couple of years of learning to bake perfectly, he started his YouTube channel Bake with Shivesh (launched in 2019) and he has also been sharing recipes on his blog by the same name, Bake with Shivesh for over eight years. He began to blog in December 2014, giving in to pressure from his friends to do so. He adds, ”A year later, I decided to switch from a blog to a website of my own. While the look changed, the idea of creating simple yet beautiful recipes is still at the core of ‘Bake With Shivesh’,“ concludes Shivesh, who is currently working on his fourth book – a baking book for children – to be released later this year(2022).
Eggless Baking with Shivesh, published by Harper Collins is available online₹966
