<p><em>Meet the DIY baker who demands all your Insta attention right now </em></p>

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It’s difficult not to feel a little envious when you stack the accomplishments of 22-year-old self-taught baker Shivesh Bhatia against your own. But look, not everyone can run a successful Instagram account (with a whopping 118,000 followers) in their early 20s, or bake the most photogenic apple-blueberry pie we’ve ever seen. Capitalising on his new-found stardom as one of India’s foremost millennial bakers, Bhatia is releasing his first bake book, titled Bake with Shivesh, this month.

“I enjoy flipping through recipe books. Ever since I started working on my recipes and sharing them on my website, I’ve wanted to work on a recipe book of my own. So, when HarperCollins got in touch with me for this opportunity, it almost felt unreal,” says a visibly ecstatic Bhatia, who was inspired by his grandmother to bake sweet treats since he was 16. The visually sumptuous book not only centres around recipes, it also focuses on baking tips and tricks, food styling and photography.

With a foreword by Pooja Dhingra, baker-in-chief of Le 15 Patisserie, and mentor to Bhatia, the book mostly contains new recipes. “Testing and retesting the recipes was one of the challenging aspects of working on the book. I consciously went the extra mile to make every recipe a little more exciting,” he adds. Apart from shooting and styling the entire book, Bhatia had the unenviable task of shortlisting 100+ recipes. “It was tough to shortlist only 51 recipes. Curating a bake book isn’t easy, but I got throu