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Welcome to Taisty Bytes with me, Mark! 🍰 Discover a world of beginner baker adventures, tips, and tales from my Devonshire kitchen.

Join us for recipes, laughs, and learning.

15/06/2026

Recipe: Chunky chocolate miso banana bread
Cookbook: Wafu Cooking
Author: Sonoko Sakai
Page: 291

It’s my birthday today 🥳 and to celebrate, I made myself this delicious miso banana bread - which is laced with chunks of dark chocolate and chopped walnuts.

With a generous amount of cinnamon and nutmeg, my kitchen smelled glorious!

This recipe uses also red miso, which adds a depth of caramel and a unique hint of parmesan.

I omitted the toasted sesame seeds which should have gone on top, as my partner is allergic.

Wafu Cooking is one of the books I treated myself to as an early birthday gift - and is one I’ll be cooking from for my next edition of Cook the World: Japan.

—

📸: Sony | Alpha A7IV
Made using KitchenAid UK

For the ingredients, I used:
Flour: Wessex Mill
Sugar: Tate and Lyle Sugars
Butter: Yeo Valley Organic
Miso: Miso Tasty
Eggs: The Happy Egg Co
Salt: Cornish Sea Salt | Recipes & Ideas
All other bits: Waitrose

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09/06/2026

Cookbook: Bold Bean Co - Full of Beans
Recipe: Romesco sauce with crispy butter beans & capers

I’ve never had butter beans this good…

Crispy butter beans and toasty capers, served on a delicious romesco sauce with fresh focaccia slices, charred tender stem broccoli topped with grated lemon zest… yeah, it’s every bit as good as it sounds!

This dish was so ridiculously easy to pull together and has got to be one of the tastiest meals I’ve made for myself in a long time.

A huge thank you to the awesome team at Bold Bean Co for sending me a copy of this cookbook. If the rest of the recipes are as delicious as this one, I’ll be reaching for it time and time again.

Now then, the questions is - what to make next..?

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Made using
Tableware:

For the ingredients, I used:
Butter beans:
Olive Oil:
Roasted peppers:
All other bits:

06/06/2026

’s Brown Butter Walnut & Oat Breakfast Cookies, the ideal ‘morning cookie’ for any day of the week.

Hope says they’re the sort of cookie you’d find in a swish café somewhere… and she’s not wrong! Browned butter makes everything better, then add toasted nuts, honey and oats and ooof… you’ve got a dangerously moreish cookie.

And oats = healthy, right?

I only had half the required walnuts in the pantry, so made the rest up with pecans (equally as delicious). I also added 1/2 tsp of cardamom, which Hope suggests in the ingredients list. Café cookie vibes +1 point!

Hope cooked up (wink) this recipe whilst prepping for a phenomenal adventure called a Transhumance - which is essentially where you move livestock from their winter keep to open pastures for the summer. Hope’s hike took her right through the Italian Alps and it looked like the experience of a lifetime.

Huge kudos to Laurence, her husband, who managed to do it with a broken leg!! What a champ.

Hope vlogged the whole experience over on her Youtube - so be sure to go and check that out.

And you can find the recipe for these cookies complete FREE over on her Substack. Link is in Hope’s bio here on instagram or you can search for ‘Hope Batchelor’ on Substack.

02/06/2026

Recipe: Ginger, cardamom & lemon pryaniki
Cookbook: Notes from a Small Kitchen Island
Author:
Page: 232

Pryaniki? Never heard of them? Me neither!

Yesterday morning I was sat looking at the unnecessarily large jar of stem ginger on my worktop wondering what I could make.

After doing a quick ingredient search in my .app, (not an ad, just a bloody great app!) this recipe from Debora’s book popped up and immediately piqued my interest.

Fun fact - Debora’s book is the very first cookbook I added to my shelf!

How best to describe them..? 🤔 They’re like a cross between a lebkuchen and a madeleine. The texture is like a cakey biscuit, that still has a little bite to it. It’s warmly spiced and has a lovely sweetness to it from the honey. With nuggets of stem ginger throughout and finished with a light lemon icing glaze.

The dough is made the day before and chilled overnight in the fridge to strengthen the flavours, although it can be used after an hour if you cant wait. (And I wouldn’t blame you!)

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Made using

For the ingredients, I used:
Flour:
Butter:
Honey:
Sugar:
Eggs:
All other bits:

28/05/2026

Today I fancied chocolate. Which is strange for 2 reasons…

1: I’m not a massive fan of chocolate (I know, gasp!)

And 2: It’s hotter than a hot thing today - so any attempt at baking or using chocolate has the potential to end up in an equally melted state as I’m in.

As I was cooling myself in the pantry looking around for inspiration, I spotted a tub of pistachios - and I remember these cookies speaking to me as I was flicking through The Baking Book by

So make them I did!

You don’t have to faff around with cooling the dough with these (although maybe they would have been grateful for it today!).

Once out of the oven and cooled, they set on the outside but have this gorgeous fudgy, decadent middle. You know that texture, the one that is ever so slightly claggy - the likes of which is just calling out for a cool glass of milk to be washed down with. Yeah, that texture.

Puuuuure heaven.

—

Cookbook: The Baking Book
Author:
Page: 202
Published by:

Trusty at the ready to whisk the eggs and sugar together!

Ingredients:
Flour:
Sugar:
Eggs:
All other bits from

25/05/2026

Happy Monday you awesome bunch!

It’s a bank holiday, here in the UK - and we’ve got the most perfect weather for it too. (Unless you’re fair-skinned like me and spend the whole time sun-dodging and complaining about how hot it is).

A lot going on recently, so I thought I’d spend a little time to catch up with you. I’ll put this out as a newsletter soon - but wanted to share here.

Firstly, a huge thanks you to everyone for such a lovely response to this month’s Cook the Books - The Irish Bakery and The Irish Kitchen by

It was a total joy cooking from these over the past few weeks.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be fully immersed in Korean food for the next edition of Cook the World. Thank you to everyone who has shared recipes and snippets of food history! Post due out in the first week of June.

Speak of, June is my birthday month! Can you believe I have been doing Cook the Books for a whole year now?! My very first edition was posted in May - I’m so unbelievably proud of where I’ve come with it and I’m so excited with where I’m taking it.

Over the past 12 months I’ve baked, cooked from, photographed and reviewed:
- Bakes and Wee Treats by
- Sour by
- How to Eat a Peach by
- Buns by
- Winter in the Highlands by
- Beyond Baking by
- Kitchen Table by
- Bread & War by

I’ve also given some lucky subscribers their own copy of the book featured each month.

If you’d like to check out any of my previous reviews, you can find all posts on my Substack (link in bio) completely free to read.

What started as a way to use the cookbooks on my shelf and not just stare at them looking pretty, has evolved into now working together with Authors and publishers to showcase some truly phenomenal cookbooks.

With that said, I’ll be using June as a ‘break’ month from Cook the Books - before Season 2 starts back in July. To celebrate my birthday, I’ll be using the whole month to explore my favourite place in the whole world for a special feature of Cook the World… JAPAN!

Thanks

24/05/2026

My latest Cook the Books is LIVE!

This month I’ve been cooking and baking my way through The Irish Bakery and The Irish Kitchen by , with photography by

Is it possible to get homesick for a place you’ve never been? Because that’s exactly how these books made me feel.

Both books have that rare thing a handful of cookbooks manage… they make you feel nostalgic for a home or place you’ve never lived in. For me, a lot of that nostalgia goes right back to growing up on a farm in rural Lancashire. The recipes and the images in these books… it was like looking through an old family album. It all felt very familiar.

Inside the full post: loads of food photography, 5 recipes to download and keep and a giveaway.

Come and have a read >> link in bio

FoodPhotography

22/05/2026

Cook the Books: The Irish Kitchen
Recipe: Guinness Wheaten Bread
Author:
Publisher:

Happy Friday, friends! Well, our time with The Irish Bakery and The Irish Kithchen has come to an end - at least for this edition of Cook the Books!

These two books have most certainly earned a permanent place on my kitchen cookbook shelf. What an absolute joy it’s been cooking and baking from them.

For my final recipe, Cherie suggested that I try the Guinness Wheaten Loaf, who her friend Jenny swears by - and I can see why.

This delicious bread is made with buttermilk and Guinness - and is probably one of the tastiest breads I have ever tried.

Perfect slathered with an embarrassment of butter and topped with flakey sea salt - I enjoyed mine with a bowl of hearty Irish stew.

My heart, and belly, is full.

—

📸: A7IV

For the ingredients, I used:
Flour:
Sugar:
Butter:
Salt:
All other bits:

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