Goa is in for a chocolate rush, as award-winning and social media baking sensation Shivesh Bhatia prepares to launch his new cookbook ‘Chocolate: 100 Irresistible Recipes’ in the state on March 7. He gives NT BUZZ a sneak peek into it
CHRISTINE MACHADO | NT BUZZ
This is your fifth cookbook. What made you choose to focus on chocolate this time around?
The first and most special reason was that chocolate has been a big part of my baking journey since day 1. In fact, the first dessert I ever baked was a batch of chocolate cupcakes. It is the one ingredient that I have had the most fun experimenting with. Also, while you are finalising a subject for a book it needs to be something that gives you that playground to experiment with. And chocolate is such a versatile ingredient. You can pair it with so many different flavours, and create so many different desserts out of it.
The book consists of 100 recipes. How difficult was it to curate this list?
Choosing the recipes for the books has always been a struggle. I start by creating a master list of recipes which I feel would be a great mix. But every time when I am halfway through the book, there are always recipes that get removed or added. If I am travelling somewhere and I try a new combination I try and make way for that in the book. A lot of times something that I make for the book may not turn out as well as I had imagined it in my head, so that goes out. Sometimes I have also set aside recipes, which may be delicious to eat but are not styling or photographing well for the book. These I may keep to use for social media instead. The book is always a work in progress and honestly, until the day it goes to press, I am always making changes.
You have experimented with new pairings in your chocolate adventures for this book. Could you tell us more?
Two years back, when I began working on the recipes for this book, I was wondering if chocolate and pistachio would be something that people would be open to. We had grown up eating chocolate with almonds or hazelnuts. Using pistachios was new and experimental then. But to my surprise, right before the release of the book, the Dubai Chocolate took social media by storm and everybody was talking about it. The other thing I personally enjoyed was pairing chocolate with passion fruit and mango. I have always loved eating the passion fruit and chocolate macaroon but for the book I decided to make a frozen tropical tiramisu where the ladyfinger biscuits are chocolate and it is paired with passion fruit and mango. When you think of the classic tiramisu you think of the coffee, but these flavours gave the tiramisu a tropical twist and it worked really well.
You have also tried a few new techniques while working on these recipes.
As somebody who is putting out so many recipes on social media and my blog it is very important to make sure that I am putting some fresh techniques and some new desserts into the book. One thing that I tried for the first time while doing trials for this book and which really stood out was definitely the strawberry white chocolate vertical cake. Usually, when you stack up a cake, you put the layers on horizontally. But for this one, when you slice into it, there is a sweet surprise waiting inside where the layers are stacked vertically. I think that looks really cool. Besides this, the book also features this huge banana swirl cake topped with sautéed banana chips, honeycombs and chocolate ganache and it is delicious. It looks extremely unique but at the same time it’s actually very simple to make. So what I have tried to do is to try and introduce these interesting final looks to something as simple as cake and try and break it down super simply so that someone who is trying it knows that they are signing up for a challenge but at the same time doesn’t feel intimidated to try it.
Some of your creations have come about purely by happy accident. Are any such recipes featured in the book?
There are these ombre chocolate cookies in the book where you can see the cookie has a really dark chocolate dough then slightly lighter and then a vanilla chocolate dough. This was never part of the recipe when I was working on the book. On the same day that we were doing multiple cookie trials, I realised there were three complementing coloured doughs from lighter to darker sitting on my kitchen counter. These were supposed to be three separate cookies being tested out for different recipes. I thought it would be interesting to just merge all three into one and create a single cookie. Personally, I think they are the cutest cookies in the book.
Are there any recipes which are deeply personal for you in this book?
The Matilda chocolate cake reminds of the chocolate cakes that I have grown up eating. The chocolate cakes that were made at home were never this fancy. But the idea of creating that comforting, really indulgent chocolate cake comes from there. The chocolate cake flan in the book is inspired by the chocolate flan that my nani would make a lot while I was growing up. Blending that with the chocolate cake turned out really interesting.
What made you choose Goa, as one of the places to launch your book?
Every time I used to do any event or workshop or demo, my comments would always be flooded with people from Goa asking me to consider Goa for my next one. Somehow, all of these years I never got the chance to do this. So, when we were putting the list together for this book tour, I knew that it had to be one of the first places on it. Personally, I am very excited to meet everyone from my community in Goa for the first time in person. Something tells me that the enthusiasm is going to be on the next level.
In today’s digital age, where people tend to prefer online medium over print, why come out with a recipe book? You too share a lot of recipes online.
I feel there is still a big audience for cookbooks. For me, books are targeted at this very core audience which is really dedicated to baking and want to pursue it seriously. I feel there are a lot of us, including myself who appreciate the feeling of baking with a physical cookbook. Also, I still believe for anyone who wants to learn baking and pick up on tips and tricks which will help them not only with these recipes but also otherwise, books are a great way of doing it. On social media, in all the videos I do, the recipe level is extremely basic and simple. All my videos are up to a maximum of 40 or 45 seconds and there is only so much that I can really include or share in that. But in the book, I am sharing tips and tricks in every single recipe which otherwise is not possible to share through social media.
What do people often get wrong when working with chocolate?
Until a couple of years there was a lack of awareness with regards to what kind of chocolate should be used, what is the difference between couverture and compound chocolate. But this is changing now and people are understanding the importance of investing in good quality chocolate. Baking is something that you need to do with a lot of patience and precision and the measurements have to be really accurate. If the recipe says cups, you have to use cups and not spoons, and not just the cups you would drink water out of. When you have these basics in place you could have a lot of fun.
What is a recent chocolate dessert which you have tried that you would like to try and create soon?
Going back to the Dubai chocolate, I have not created that bar as it is, although I have tasted it from multiple brands. I feel since I am clearly obsessed with it, even now, it is high time I create this bar in my kitchen as well.
