After I opened a bag of Jet-Puffed mini-marshmallows to make Sarah's Kieffer's S'mores Cookies, I decided I might as well make one of Kieffer's recipes that specifically calls for mini-marshmallows: her "Kitchen Sink Cookies." As the name suggests, these cookies have everything: peanut butter, oats, kettle chips, pretzels, mini-marshmallows, chocolate chips, and butterscotch chips. The one thing they don't include is wheat flour.
To make the batter, you cream room temperature butter with granulated sugar, light brown sugar, and corn syrup; add creamy peanut butter, followed by eggs and vanilla; and then add in salt, baking soda, oats, potato chips, pretzels, mini-marshmallows, chocolate chips (I used Ghiradelli 60% chips), and butterscotch chips (I used Callebaut Gold pistoles). I used a #16 scoop to portion out the dough and I got 31 cookies from a batch. I flattened the cookies before baking, trying to ensure that there weren't any marshmallows sticking out on the sides where they would be prone to melt and burn.
These are not "pan-banging" cookies, in the sense that you don't need to repeatedly bang the pan while the cookies are baking to create a series of ripples, but there is a little bit of pan banging involved. The recipe instructs you to rotate the pans halfway through baking, and then to bang the pan once closer to the end of the baking time. I thought the baked cookies looked great, with little puddles of melted marshmallow and chocolate visible on top.
The cookies also tasted great. These were obviously peanut butter cookies, hearty with the texture of oats, rich with chocolate, and punctuated with some nice crunch from the salty snacks. The cookies were also super chewy, and they remained very bendy even after they were fully cooled. In theory, I don't mind a bendy cookie -- but these were quite a pain to store. Not only were the cookies so malleable that they deformed easily during handling and when I stacked them in a plastic container (especially because the cookies were not flat due to the random potato chips and pretzel pieces sticking out of them), but all of the cookies also had spots of melted marshmallow on the bottom that remained very sticky. I had to put layers of wax paper between the cookies, and even then, the marshmallow stuck to the paper.
These cookies reminded me of the Monster Cookies from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, which are very chewy (but not bendy) peanut butter-oatmeal-choocolate cookies made with only a little bit of flour. The Monster Cookie recipe also calls for corn syrup, but a much smaller amount. I wonder if the greater amount of corn syrup in the Kitchen Sink Cookie recipe is what makes them so bendy, or perhaps the total lack of any wheat flour. Whatever it is, I think it's a problem. I think I'll stick with the Monster Cookies, which are just as delicious but much lower maintenance when it comes to handling and storage!
Recipe: "Kitchen Sink Cookies" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer.
Previous Post: "The Cookie That Has Everything: Monster Cookies," August 24, 2010.
Comments