For 22-year-old Shivesh Bhatia, baking has been a great leveller. Where life would have given lemons to many, Bhatia feels baking did the same for him. "I have literally whipped up one disaster after another," he recalls, of his initial experiments with dessert.

But, when one skims through his debut cookbook, Bake With Shivesh (HarperCollins India), it's hard to gauge the failed attempts or toiling in the kitchen, which would have gone into the making of this genius. "Oh! You can't even imagine," the self-taught Delhi-based baker tells us over the phone. Here, he recounts the first time he did it, when he was in Class IX. "I baked a batch of vanilla cupcakes with my cousins for our nani, who had taken ill. But since we were too intimidated to try the recipe from scratch, we got a Betty Crocker cake mix. We, unfortunately, burnt the batch and still ended up frosting them horribly. But, I just had so much fun in the kitchen, I knew I had to try this again," he adds.