When I find myself with a lot of random candy, chocolates, nuts, or other little sweets, I like to make my “kitchen sink” cookies. It’s perfect for using up random leftover ingredients from different recipes where you don’t have enough to make that specific recipe again. You can really make this recipe your own with any kind of mix-in that your heart desires.
I highly recommend that you make this cookie dough a day in advance of when you actually plan to bake and serve. Aging the cookies allows the flavor to further develop and results in a tastier cookie. If you can’t wait, go ahead and bake them right away! They are still tasty. 🙂
These are also excellent for freezing for later. I like to pre-scoop them into cookie portions and then place the entire sheet tray in the freezer. After a few hours, you can transfer these to a container or bag.
Ingredients
Mix-ins – You can use any assortment of mix-ins as long as you have 4 cups total. While the butter & sugar is creaming, you can chop up your mix-ins and measure out what you have to decide if you need more or less. Chop your mix-ins into smaller chunks, about chocolate chip sized. I’ll generally start with my more “random” ingredients and then fill in what I’m missing with chocolate chips. In this case, I had an assortment of pretzels, almonds, walnuts, candies (kit-kats, butterfingers, snickers, hersheys) which ended up being about 3 cups of mix-ins, so I supplemented that with another 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chunks.
Salt – This is more salt than what typical cookie recipes call for. I find that my various mix-ins are pretty sweet, so I like adding more salt for balance.
Kitchen Sink Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter softened
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 eggs
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 4 cups mix-ins
Instructions
- Cream together butter, brown sugar and white sugar until creamy and smooth. Periodically stop the mixer to scrape the butter and sugar off of the paddle.
- While butter and sugar is creaming, chop mix-ins if they are too chunky. You'll want them relatively small (chocolate chip sized).
- Add eggs to the mixer one at a time and continue mixing.
- Add vanilla extract and salt and continue mixing.
- In a separate bowl, mix together AP flour and baking soda until just combined. Don't worry if it's a little streaky, you'll continue mixing with the mix-ins.
- Add in the mix-ins and mix just another few seconds until the mix-ins are distributed.
- Bake at 350F for ~12 minutes. Cookies will look a little puffy but will deflate after removed from the oven. Allow to cool ~10 minutes before enjoying.
Try my Crispy Gooey Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Not cookies? Try Peach Galette.