Named for their resemblance to the nuts from the Ohio buckeye tree, buckeyes are the impossibly delicious confection made with a ball of smooth peanut butter coated nearly all the way — save for a small area around the top — with a layer of chocolate. When choosing chocolate for this sweet holiday treat, the options are plenty, including chips, wafers, and chocolate bars.

But it’s important to remember that not all varieties of chocolate are created equal. For the very best result, this is the type of chocolate you’ll want to stick with every time you make buckeyes.

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Everyone has a favorite holiday cookie from the cookie plate. Sugar cookies are nice, and yeah I can get down with some gingerbread, but I’m always secretly eyeing the peanut butter blossoms or the spritz cookies. What about you?

This year for the holidays, we asked Google to tell us the most-searched holiday cookies in every state. They looked at searches across the country during the beginning of December and compiled this very interesting list. I’m honestly a little surprised by their findings! You’ll see lots of chocolate chip cookies, pumpkin cookies, and no-bake finds. The Midwest is dominated by spritz cookies (no surprise there), and apparently there’s something called a “monster cookie” that I have yet to try.

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Welcome to Snapshot Cooking, the home of Kitchn’s easiest recipes. These mini recipes are so simple you can practically cook from the before-and-after snapshot itself.

Searching for a last-minute holiday treat that everyone will love? Christmas bark to the rescue! It’s a salty-sweet classic that goes by many other names (like Christmas Crunch, Christmas Crackle, or Christmas Crack), but the baseline idea is usually the same: You pour a simple homemade caramel sauce over a layer of crackers, bake it, then cover it with chocolate to create a no-fail toffee that’s broken up like bark.

Below, you’ll find our tried-and-tested take on the traditional version — plus four new variations if you’re looking for something different (and equally delicious!) this holiday season. The best part? Each one only needs a handful of ingredients to make.

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If you’ve never had a buckeye, then first and foremost you should know that these sweet confections — that most often appear around holiday time — are pure bliss. They’re made with a ball of smooth peanut butter coated nearly all the way, save for a small area around the top, with a firm, crisp layer of chocolate. They can have a reputation for being tricky and messy to pull off, but as long as you steer clear of these common mistakes, you’ll find that neither is true and they’re actually quite easy.

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Here’s a sweet way to encourage cooking skills in any aspiring junior chefs you may know: Make an Instant Pot in which they pretend cook all their favorite recipes, both real and imagined! It’s like a play kitchen, but even better. The process of making these mini pots isn’t exactly simple, but it’s absolutely worth busting out your crafting skills for. And when it’s done you’ll be bringing a kid joy during the holidays. That’s reason enough to dust off the old glue gun right? Right. Here’s how you do it.

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If there is one thing Ina Garten is known for, it’s her roast chicken. It’s her signature dish for Friday night supper with Jeffrey, and anyone and everyone who’s ever made it raves about it. (Five stars! 1,000+ reviews!)

Yet despite the accolades and fanfare, I’d never actually made her version before. My go-to roast chicken recipe is actually Jacques Pepin’s — I’ve stuck with it for years for it’s sheer simplicity. But lately I’ve been less enthusiastic about it because of problems with the skin sticking to the skillet and lack of crispiness. So I decided to give Ina’s a try and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I loved it.

Get the recipe: Ina Garten’s Perfect Roast Chicken

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Living in a big city means paying a lot for a small apartment. And as a person who cooks almost every day, the meager amount of counter space available in my kitchen is a constant source of frustration. Thankfully, Joanna Gaines — known, of course, for her uncanny ability to overhaul and redecorate homes — has the secret weapon to maximizing your counter space.

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I’m not totally sure I understand how to use Reddit, but I do know that for the past few weeks, every time I browsed the food and cooking-related threads, a recipe for spicy cranberry salsa continued to pop up. I sort of glazed over it the first few times, until I realized it was being spooned over cream cheese and served with crackers as a holiday appetizer — a very popular one, it seemed. I couldn’t decide whether it sounded strange and disgusting or strange and delicious, but I knew I needed to find out for myself.

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Welcome to the moment you’ve all been waiting for … the Kitchn Awards of 2018. This is our chance to celebrate, memorialize, and poke a little fun at the things that cooks and food-lovers talked about this year. From the alternative milk of the year to the food hero we were most grateful for, there were many moments to remember.

Check these awards that we discussed, laughed over, and debated — then tell us: Who do you think deserves a Kitchn award as we leave 2018?

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