It's a pretty popular culinary opinion that everyone should own a cast iron pan, but I am of the opinion that everyone should also own a mini cast iron pan. Like its classic 30cm counterpart, the mini has a myriad of delicious uses from appetisers to dessert.

Alison Roman's salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookies are everywhere. Bon Appétit, Eater, Nylon, Smitten Kitchen and The New York Times have covered them in glowing detail; The Cookies pop up on my Instagram discover feed literally every day. The best recipes are more than the sum of their parts, but the sheer volume of breathless, googly-eyed reviews suggest that a concerning number of people have lived deprived, salted-butter-cookie-less lives until now.

It used to be that tracking a person involved a deep knowledge of nature, a keen eye and maybe a dog or two. Nowadays it doesn't involve more than a bit of code and a few mouse clicks. Here, we'll walk you through all the different ways your information is tracked online and how you can protect your data from prying eyes.

The holidays give us carte blanche to consume both alcohol and sugar with reckless abandon - bonus points if you can streamline the process. Gelatinous shots may be the millennial-preferred vehicle for the two substances but, like Pete Shweddy before me, I prefer a festive ball.

I don’t know that 2017 was that bad, was it? Haven’t we reached some sort of terrible plateau where each year just remains as horribly bad as the last? Or are we sinking ever further?

I don’t know.

This isn’t about that. This is about all the good things I enjoyed in 2017.

As a person who writes a column dedicated to lazy meals, I see a lot of recipes and videos for "simple" and "easy" dishes.. Most are shot from an overhead angle and include too much grade F cheese and ranch dressing for even my liking, but I came across something in my normal course of late-night Imgur browsing.

Do you ever have those moments when you just need a warm chocolate chip cookie, but don't feel like making several dozen? I know I do, which is why I am happy to have found this 2-minute cookie recipe from Epicurious.

Browser cookies are one of those technical bits of the internet that almost everyone has some awareness of. They're also probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of browsing. Today we're here to clear up the confusion.

"Umami" may not be a flavour you associate with desserts, but a bit of salty-sweet complexity can take a batch of cookies from "pretty freaking good" to "downright addicting." To get extra oomph in any dessert, baked or otherwise, all you need is a bit of malted milk powder.

These days, it seems there's a cookie cutter for every season and holiday, but I just don't have the storage space for Santa hats, hearts and pretty autumn leaves. Luckily, there is an elegant (and free) way to get cute leaf-shaped cookies: Just gather them from nature.

Tahini is a sesame paste most commonly used in hummus, baba ghanoush, and salad dressings, but it can add moisture and nutty goodness to a whole variety of sweets.

Chilling your dough is a necessary step when making cut-out sugar cookies, but rolling out a super hard disk of cold dough can take a good bit of effort. To save yourself all that arm work (and a bit of time) roll it out before chilling.

Cookies are a gift, period. But if you want to make your homemade cookies look a bit more professional, all you need is a muffin tin.

Baking with friends is one of my favourite holiday activities, but cooking in someone else's home can put me slightly out of sorts. Not only are other people distracting, but I don't quite trust the measuring cups of others. Luckily, there is an elegant solution: Pre-measure your ingredients beforehand in your kitchen.

Homemade cookies are a great gift, especially if they're for someone who's hard to shop for. But if you need to send them in the mail, there are some things you need to know.

All cookies are delicious in their own right, but sometimes you have a craving for specific kind, and those cravings should be indulged. If you have a hankering for the soft, fluffy, Lofthouse-style cookies, you'll need to grab some cake flour.

I'm an equal opportunity cookie eater and, while I love a thin, crispy cookie, I firmly believe there's a time and a place for a soft, fluffy one as well. (The time is always and the place is my mouth.) According to delish, the secret to getting soft, cloud-like cookies every time is simple: just replace the butter with cream cheese.

Pie crust is already pretty tasty on its own, but you can take it up a notch by rolling it out in cookie or cracker crumbs, rather than boring ol' flour.

You may think of olive oil as a strictly "savoury" cooking fat, but its fruity, grassy flavour can add surprising depth to all sorts of desserts.