Kitchen sink cookies, slightly modified

The "kitchen sink" aspect, prepped

Most Fridays I help other people make books, but today I stayed home and made cookies, obliquely inspired by Scraps, Peels, and Stems. That book includes a recipe for kitchen sink muffins which I've not tried yet. I bake scones, cookies, pies, and the occasional cake but very rarely do I make muffins. I'm not sure why that is, especially since Jill's recipe looks pretty darned delicious. But when I stumbled across this recipe for kitchen sink cookies in the New York Times and saw that it called for a mix of sweet and salty things, whatever you happen to have on hand, I was pretty much sold immediately. You see, I've been troubled by a couple of candy canes that have been sitting on the coffee table since Christmas.

A digression. There are some fixed points in my belief system and one of them is that a Christmas stocking must contain a banana, a tangerine, some chocolate coins, and a candy cane. The tangerine and coins are generally consumed without much delay, and making banana bread the week after Christmas is pretty much automatic around here. But those candy canes? They sit around for months, eventually melting messily onto a pile of linens if I've been so foolish as to shift them to a drawer without thinking. So although the recipe called for homemade toffee, I quickly realized that I could probably use candy cane instead. Not only that, it looked to be a way to use some of the heap of broken tortilla chips that I've insisted I'll find a way to use.

Some means of production (yes, the hammer was part of the process)

 I modified the recipe slightly (and occasionally accidentally). More than one person suggested that there were too many bits and pieces in the recipe so I reduced the "kitchen sink" content by about a third (I might not do that another time . . . ) I don't have the patience to wait for dough to chill in a refrigerator and so many of the cookies I make are of the "roll-in-a-ball-and-squash" school that I opted to go with that familiar approach. I baked for more like 10 - 15 minutes at 350ish rather than the 20 minutes at 325 that the recipe suggested. And the dough was pretty stiff so I inadvertently increased the amount of vanilla a bit and also added a splash of milk.

One commenter on the original recipe said she freezes the pre-formed cookies to save to bake later; that seemed a fine plan to me so I set some aside for later. My cookies turn out a lot smaller, more plentiful, and tidier than those in the original recipe; I'm okay with that.

The kitchen sink has never looked so delicious!