Recipe & DIY: Peanut Butter & Pumpkin "Name" Cookies

VIEW FULL RECIPE & DIY

Dusting off the old blog today with a recipe for Peanut Butter & Pumpkin dog treats, from My Baking Addiction. I was really excited to use my new dog bone cookie cutter and letter embossing set to personalize each cookie with Hoku’s name.

Aside from the dough being a bit sticky which made it a little difficult to stamp out the shapes, the recipe itself is really simple. I always appreciate a good dog treat recipe that uses only a few human-grade ingredients. I’d definitely suggest keeping a bowl of flour nearby for dusting the cookie cutter before every cut as well as for dusting the rolling pin.  

Hoku wouldn’t leave my side the entire time I was making these because I must say they smelled so amazing. (And to my amusement, the flour in the air kept making him sneeze!) After waiting patiently for the treats to bake and cool, Hoku finally got his chance to gobble down FOUR of his special name cookies, because hey it’s the weekend before Christmas!

A Homemade Doggy Pumpkin Pie

This year was Hoku’s first Thanksgiving with us so we wanted to make sure there was something special for him to munch on too. So while all of us humans were stuffing our faces making a lovely holiday meal in the kitchen, we carved out a little time in the day to bake Hoku some mini pumpkin pies, inspired by this recipe from the Adventures of a Dog Mom blog. I made a few tweaks due to Hoku’s possible Shiba wheat allergies and substituted the wheat flour for almond flour. And since I didn’t have any oatmeal, I used oat flour instead. And for the applesauce, we pureed a fresh Fuji apple.

So there you have it, a super simple and healthy Thanksgiving dessert!

Recipe: Sweet Potato Pretzels

The second treat we made for Hoku were sweet potato pretzels, adapted from another Dog Milk recipe. Because of Hoku’s potential for wheat allergies, we substituted almond flour for whole wheat flour. The hardest part of the process was twisting the dough into the pretzel shapes. Not sure if it’s because of the almond flour substitution, but our dough tubes seemed to break apart quite easily during the twisting. We made about 14 pretzels total and lightly sprinkled some unsweetened coconut flakes over each one to give it that salted pretzel look.

With the leftover sweet potato, we made little hoku-shaped (star-shaped) potato chips by slicing up the sweet potato into thin pieces, cutting out the shapes by hand and baking them. Cookie cutters would work great here for nice, even shapes. 

Note: Each pretzel is approximately 100 calories (mainly from the almond flour), so again it’s one of those extra extra special treats we’ll only give Hoku on occasion. He gobbled one up in less than 5 seconds so you know it’s that good. 

Note #2: So we made the mistake of baking these at 175F instead of 175C! No wonder we had to double the bake time to get them not to crumble. Must read recipes better next time :)