Apple Cinnamon Pomegranate Cookies

At the farmers market yesterday morning I picked up a pomegranate, just because I felt like it, and because pomegranates are cool. Then in the afternoon I was baking some apple cookies and I had an idea. I was using this recipe which has optional nuts and raisins, which I didn't really want to bother with. But I thought, why not toss in a bunch of pomeganate seeds instead? Would that even work? I didn't really know what would happen to pomegranate seeds if you baked them, and a quick bit of googling didn't turn up any existing cookie recipes that used them. So unfortunately I chickened out and just stuck some seeds into the last few cookies of the batch. I say "unfortunately" because it turned out to be awesome. The pomegranate seeds stay pretty much unchanged in the cookies, and give you blasts of juicy flavor when you hit one, like little pome-grenades. The next batch I do is going to have pomegranates all the way through.

Another thing I did put in this batch was a bunch of cinnamon chips that Lacey gave me last weekend. They're like mini chocolate chips, but cinnamon. And I love cinnamon. Unfortunately, while you can't go wrong with a cinnamon-apple combination, the chips sort of got lost among everything else. They're really small, plus the nutmeg, cloves, and apple chunks pretty much took over the flavor department. I think I'll cut back on nutmeg and cloves next time, too.

Still, all in all: Yummy!

Update: I had one experiment left over to today, and it turns out that the pomegranate seeds are really best when the cookies are right out of the oven. They dry up a bit by the next day, so you don't get such a shot of juice. Maybe that's why they're not so much used like raisins, which last relatively unchanged.