Prachi Dhabal Deb is an internationally award winning cake artist from Pune. She is a 2 World Record Holder from World Book of Records, London. She has brought justice to her art by making cakes and cookies in the most creative fashion. Her work is crisp and precise with a keen eye for detailing. She has mastered the art of creating royal-looking, luxurious bakes, which are majestic in their appeal and delicious in taste. She specializes in Royal-Icing art and is recognized as the top artist of Royal-icing in India. Royal-icing is a difficult medium to work with and is very fragile.
Though highly prestigious, having being used for decorating the cakes for the British royal family, this delicate art requires high amount of patience and skills and finds very limited commercial success worldwide. Being traditionally egg based, the popularity was not much in Indian cake industry as well. Understanding the customer base in India, she knew that to have maximum admirers of her art, she will have to make eggless cakes and royal icing, thus she came up with her own product, Vegan Royal Icing, in association with Sugaring—the same is available across popular online platforms nationally and internationally and has been a huge success. Apart from being one of the elite groups of Cake Artists across the globe, Prachi also is an Internationally acclaimed Judge for various competitions around the world
Women Fitness India gets into a heart-to-heart conversation as she graces our June Cover.
Namita Nayyar:
Prachi from being a World Record Holder, to learning cakes from the baker of the British Royal Family, walk our readers through your journey and your initial days of finding your calling in baking?
Prachi Dhabal Deb
As a child, I loved baking and I remember it used to be my favorite summertime activity as a ten-year old. Assisting my mother when she was making jams and fresh compotes from peaches and plums freshly plucked out of our garden, baking tiny cupcakes, it was an activity I really looked forward to. I also had a fascination for the arts and crafts and color but then academics took over and the main focus was on education, so I went on to completing my honors in accounts and finance and then working in a multi- national company as a financial analyst. It was a great run in the finance sector for me and everything was hunky dory but it was still not what my heart desired.
It wasn’t something that I looked forward to, going to work and all of that. When it became monotonous and due to health reasons, I took a break and my husband who is in the IT sector and got to travel and I travelled with him and that break helped me in finding all my lost loves like painting, baking and cresting new things.
When I returned home, I started baking profusely and all my friends and family were very appreciative of my cakes and my cakes were the star of most parties that I attended or was hosting. Eventually, an event manager friend coaxed me to bake birthday cakes and that kickstarted my baking venture in June 2012. I was baking copiously everyday after that and 3 or 4 years down the line I realized that I was drawn towards a medium that I really liked was Royal Icing that I discovered through a book called The Art of Royal Icing by Sir Eddie Spence MBE.
I was so mesmerized by this art form that I wanted to go to London and learn from him. He is a legendary cake artist who has also baked for the British royal family. So, I got the honor of learning from him twice and that is how my journey of royal icing began.
I came back to India and started making royal icing cakes but then I realized the traditional recipe had eggs and then my whole focus was to develop a recipe that’s eggless or from a vegan source so that it would suit the Indian market, I worked on it for a couple of years and figured a great recipe after a lot of trial and error and I got in touch with an Indian company to launch this vegan recipe as a commercial product in 2019 and it’s doing really well in India and internationally. In 2022, I completed ten years and to celebrate that milestone of my journey, I made two World Records, for the biggest vegan royal icing structure and the maximum number of vegan royal icing structures. It was a double celebration!
FULL INTERVIEW ON THE NEXT PAGE!
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