HYDERABAD: Recently I was talking to a prominent home chef discussing the recent spurt in the number of home chefs in Hyderabad. She immediately mentioned that most of her customers prefer to pick up their cakes and desserts from home bakers rather than shops. According to estimates, more than a thousand home chefs operate from all over the city offering cakes for birthdays and other occasions, and other confectionaries like cupcakes, plum cakes, brownies, and even bread and pizza bases.
The perception is that this profession has low entry barriers and allows people to make a decent income even working parttime. The interest in baking has even reached my home with my wife attending a weekly baking class at Hyderabad Bangalee Samity. Homebakers.co.in is a portal which is trying to bring the home bakers of Hyderabad together onto a single platform, organizing events like The Great India Bake Show, which brings home bakers together for networking and training.
Sonali Mitra from the portal says that more than a hundred home bakers of Hyderabad have been listed on the platform after careful scrutiny of more than four hundred applicants. Sonali is an accomplished home baker herself with her own brand Gigglebellies, dishing out themed and structural cakes for her clients. The top-end of cake baking uses advanced techniques like cake engineering, and the bakers need a lot of artistic and even sculptural skills to make such cakes. Cakes in this segment can cost upwards of fifteen hundred rupees per kilogram.
One of the most acclaimed home bakers who is known for her designer cakes is Radha Dhaka of La Petite Meringue. Being a sculptor herself, she translates her expertise into gourmet cakes, often transforming figurines from photos. Radha rues the fact that though there is a huge interest in home baking, many home bakers lack the requisite expertise. She is also into conducting structured courses in areas like cake decoration.
Arundati Rao from Escapades Culinary Studio provides training courses for aspiring home bakers apart from undertaking baking assignments. She finds the interest in home baking going up every year, and has a steady flow of students who wish to make a career in baking. All aspects of the business from basic baking to marketing the products are covered by this course.
Brownies, plum cakes and cupcakes are items which are fast moving with a lot of home bakers operating in these segments. Buoyed by the huge popularity of his brownies prominent home baker Faisal Tayabali of Euphoria has recently set up an outlet for his products. Young Sanchay Gumidelli of Trio La Patisserie bakes and markets nine varieties of brownies, as well as banana walnut bread from his home at Bowenpally since 2016. An alumnus of Culinary Academy of India, Sanchay got into home baking because of his passion, and also due to the fact that it does not need too much of investment. The plum cakes from Trio became a rage during the Christmas season, for its superior quality and taste.
The challenges faced by home bakers are many. Absence of a robust delivery system often prevents them from attending to a larger client base. Many bakers are not aware of requirements such as FSSAI registration and can run into trouble due to this. Marketing is mainly through word-of-mouth and social media. Many are also working with bakeries and corporate canteens as a front-end for their products. And they constantly upgrade their skills to beat the competition.
Sabyasachi is a food enthusiast and blogs at www.foodaholix.in