Homemade Dog Biscuits

One afternoon last week I sat outside with Kardelen and Sofia, petting our landlord's basset hound, Zoe. Zoe and I have a bit of history together. I remember six years ago when she was a puppy [read: excited little doggie who jumped up on you constantly]. My favorite khakis and a pair of nylons fell victim to her muddy paws and nails. However, though I have never claimed to be an animal person, I've now grown quite fond of Zoe.

One of the perks about living in this duplex is finally "having" a dog. Not "having" in the sense of responsibility, but in the "grandparenty" sense--you know, all enjoyment and no burden. For the girls' sake, we've wanted an animal, but couldn't have one in our rental. Now we do!

So that day as we all admired and petted Zoe, I decided we should do something to show our appreciation for this fine canine. Here's what we did.

I remember coming across a recipe for homemade dog biscuits on a blog I'd just found, everythingishomemade.com, and I quickly found it again. The recipe mixes together very quickly, containing just peanut butter (most dogs like it, I guess!), flour, oats, baking powder, milk, and molasses. You roll it out like sugar cookie dough.

The smaller the dog, the smaller the biscuit should be, and we found the perfect tiny dog-bone shaped cookie cutter to use. (I'm a cookie cutter fanatic, especially tiny ones.) We cut and cut and cut. . .and cut some more. Oh my, I had no idea just how many 1-inch biscuits it yielded! Maybe a tiny cookie cutter wasn't so great, after all. After filling four pans of cute little biscuits, I finally tossed the last scraps instead of re-rolling them again! Call me wasteful. . .but since I wasn't even sure Zoe would like them, I thought I'd err on the side of caution. And I estimated we made over a hundred of the cute little guys. That was enough for me. We baked them, let them sit in the oven overnight to harden, and were ready to test them out.

Zoe does like them! She's going to become one spoiled dog, because every day when we see her, both girls want to give her a biscuit. (They'd give her more if I'd let her.) And I plan to keep a perpetual jar of the homemade treats for our favorite dog.

If you'd like to make something special for your favorite canine companion, check out this recipe.