Chocolate Kitchen Sink Cookies (AKA Mighty Rhinos)

These Chocolate Kitchen Sink Cookies are what happens when you decide to hunt around for Cookie-ish Items when The Beloved needs a cookie. We’re talking oats, cashews, chocolate chips, dried sour cherries, and crunchy pretzels, all packed into one gloriously chunky cookie.

The dough recipe came from my friend the Culinary Alchemist some 14 years ago, and the mixins are all me. Or my cupboards, anyway! I have tweaked the recipe a bit for a better balance of flavors and textures and more chocolate flavor.

I’ve recently tweaked the dough for a richer chocolate flavor and a better balance of sweetness and texture. Sweet, salty, crunchy, chewy, chocolatey, and just a little ridiculous. In the best possible way.

Kitchen Sink Cookies, at a Glance

✅Skill Level: Beginner
✅Skills: The Creaming Method, portioning dough
✅Type: Drop Cookies
✅Number of Ingredients: 18
✅Prep Time: 15-20 minutes
✅Chill Time: 1 hour
✅Cook Time: 14-15 minutes
✅Yield: 24 cookies
✅Category: Cookies and Bars

Jump Straight to the Recipe

You’ll Love Chocolate Kitchen Sink Cookies If…

• Love a bunch of mix-ins
• Enjoy a cookie with many different textures
• Crave crispy edges and chewy centers
• Think the salty-sweet flavor combination is Not To Be Missed
• Wonder why cashews don’t get shoved into cookies more often
• Think garnishing cookies is as much fun as making the dough

Ingredients and Substitutions

If you just want to get on with it and whip these babies up, you can jump straight to the recipe. Otherwise, I’ll go over all the ingredients (and there are a lot) and offer some substitutions where possible.

Yes, this looks like a LONG LIST OF ITEMS, and it is. But let’s break it down into ingredients that get added together:

Ingredients That Get Creamed Together

• Butter: The main source of fat for the cookies, butter helps to create the texture of the cookies, carry flavor, and assist in browning, and allow a certain amount of spread for a generously-sized cookie.
• Granulated sugar: Provides sweetness and goes into solution with some of the free liquid in the dough (maple syrup, water in egg white and yolk, and even the vanilla. Granulated sugar allows for a bit more spread and crispy edges.
• Dark brown sugar: Dark brown sugar brings additional moisture and sweetness, and it contributes to a chewy center and deeper flavor. If all you have is light brown sugar, you can absolutely use that instead.
• Kosher salt: I almost always add salt when creaming the butter and sugar so it gets evenly distributed throughout the dough. Salt balances sweetness, amplifies the chocolate flavor, and makes sure the cookies taste fantastic, even with all those mix-ins.
• Vanilla extract: Rounds out all the flavors.
• Instant coffee: Just 1 1/2 teaspoons is enough to deepen the chocolate flavor. If you are very sensitive to coffee and don’t like the flavor, you can leave it out, but I can’t even taste it.

Ingredients That Get Incorporated After Creaming

• Cocoa Powder: Normally, cocoa powder would be considered a dry ingredient, and it definitely works as a “drier,” but in this case, it’s whisked together with the maple syrup and egg. This helps to hydrate it and bring out as much of its rich chocolate flavor as possible without actually blooming it in hot water or fat. It’s a small amount of cocoa, but it packs a surprising punch! I use American cocoa powder as opposed to Dutch process. If you usually use Dutch process, you can cut the amount of baking soda in half to 1/4 teaspoon.
• Maple Syrup: Contributes sugar and liquid to keep the cookies moist and provide some more dimension to the sweetness of the cookie. If you prefer, substitute honey in an equal amount by weight.
• Eggs: One egg helps to emulsify the batter, carry flavor, and contribute to the structure of the cookie.

Ingredients to Add to all the Above

• All-purpose flour: Provides the bulk and gluten in the recipe. All-purpose flour is the perfect choice for crispy edges and chewy centers.
• Rolled oats: I use sprouted oats from Costco. Use regular rolled oats if that’s what you have, If all you have are quick oats, note that, since they have more surface area and will absorb liquids more readily, cookies made with quick oats won’t spread as much. Help them along by pressing them a bit flatter during the shaping process.
• Baking powder: A touch of pH-balanced leavening for the perfect interior texture.
• Baking soda: A little baking soda helps to neutralize the acidic cocoa powder. If using Dutch process cocoa, you can reduce the amount to 1/4 teaspoon.

Mix-Ins: Up to Interpretation, But This Is What I Use

• Dried cherries: This was actually a late add-on. I felt like the cookies would benefit from chewy pops of tart fruit. I was right! You can omit them, subbing in an equal amount of any of the other mix-ins, or you can substitute other dried fruits: dried cranberries, currants, or snipped dried apricots would all work really well.
• Mini pretzels: Pretzels are great mix-ins, because they add plenty of crunch and texture along with little salt crystals that play well with the chocolate. I use “regular” mini pretzel twists in the dough–just lightly crushed by hand. For garnish, I found Itty Bitty Mini Pretzels (no affiliate connection) by Hanover, and they work beautifully. If you cannot find the super minis, go with 1 regular mini in the center of each cookie.
• Cashews: I love the mellow, sweet nuttiness of cashews, and they deserve a chance to shine. If you don’t like cashews, substitute with your favorite nut or mixture of nuts. I coarsely chopped my jumbo cashews, so they were roughly the size of small peanuts.
• Chocolate Chips: Because of course. I use semi-sweet chocolate chips, but feel free to use milk chocolate chips or even white chocolate chips if you’d like.

Garnish: Finishing Touches

• Coarse sugar (not pictured): After a chill in the fridge, each portioned dough ball gets pressed into a plate of coarse sugar, giving the finished cookies a subtle sparkle and a little bit of extra sweetness.
• Chocolate Chips: Just a few chocolate chips (3-5), on top of each cookie gives everyone a preview of the bits of chocolatey goodness that awaits.
• Itty Bitty Mini Pretzels: Aside from being crunchy and adorable, the itty bitty pretzels offer another visual flavor cue. If you don’t have itty bitty minis, substitute 1 regular mini pretzel twist in the center of each cookie.

Why aren’t there any dried cherries or cashews on top as garnish? The dried cherries would burn without the insulation afforded by the dough. And even cashew halves are too big, and they just looked funny in my tests. Plus, chopping them up renders them unrecognizable as cashews, so I just save those as a surprise inside.

Be sure to tell folks the cookies contain nuts, though, just in case someone has a nut allergy.

How to Make Chocolate Kitchen Sink Cookies

Like most drop cookies, the procedure for making the dough is pretty straightforward.

Here’s what you’ll do:

1. All the ingredients to be creamed together: softened butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, vanilla, and instant coffee.
2. All creamed together. I used a hand mixer. Feel free to use a stand mixer or even work by hand. Just make sure the butter is very soft so you don’t hurt your wrist!
3. Whisk the cocoa powder and maple syrup together. Add the egg, and….
4. …whisk until smooth. This gives the cocoa powder a chance to hydrate in some liquid and fat, helping to bring out the rich, chocolate flavor.
5. Mix the cocoa powder mixture together with the creamed mixture.
6. Add the dry ingredients and fold together by hand until it is mostly mixed. It’s okay to leave a few floury bits, because you’ll continue mixing when you add the nuts, chocolate, etc.

1. Dump in all the mix-ins at once (notice the dough is still looking a bit floury at this point).
2. Use a spatula to mix in the nuts, fruit, pretzels, and chocolate chips. The dough will be Crammed Full of mix-ins, and that’s how we want it. NOT PICTURED: Portion out all the dough into 24 balls and refrigerate them, uncovered, for an hour or up to 24 hours. This allows the flour to hydrate and a minimal amount of liquid to evaporate, concentrating the flavors, especially after about 8 hours. It also firms up the butter so the cookies are much easier to shape.
3. Set up a little garnishing station–coarse sugar spread on a plate and a little bowl of chocolate chips and mini pretzels. Then press each piece of dough firmly into the sugar, flattening it to about 1/2-3/4″ (1-2cm). Knock off any excess sugar, and then place on a cookie sheet, adding a few chocolate chips and mini pretzels. They may not stick to the cookies at first, but they will in the oven, I promise.
4. Bake for 10 minutes. Some of the pretzels may fall off as the cookies spread. It’s fine. Just put them back and then bake for 4-5 more minutes, and you’re done!

Questions?

If you have any questions about this post or recipe, I am happy to help.

Simply leave a comment here and I will get back to you soon. I also invite you to ask questions in my Facebook group, Fearless Kitchen Fun.

If your question is more pressing, please feel free to email me. I should be back in touch ASAP, as long as I’m not asleep.

More Tasty Cookie Recipes

The humble drop cookie has many variations, and most of them are absolutely worth making.

Here a few from my site that you may want to check out.

If you like an amped up chocolate chip cookie, give my brown butter toffee chocolate chip cookies a try. They’ve been on the site for almost as long as these kitchen sink cookies, and they really are an elevated version of a standard chocolate chip cookie.

If you already love an oatmeal cookie, you may as well go all-in with my oatmeal raisin cookies. They are substantial and oh, so satisfying to make and to eat.

Sugar cookie fans, I think you will really love my soft, chewy sugar cookies. They’re not too sweet, nice and substantial, and beg to be decorated for your favorite holiday. Or just because.

A Note About Measurements

My recipes are almost all written by weight, including liquids, unless otherwise specified.

For accuracy and consistency of results, I encourage you to buy–and use–a kitchen scale.

I promise that baking and cleanup will be so much quicker and easier.

This is the scale that I recommend for home use. I have owned and used one for years.

Escali Primo Digital Scale

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