You Should Make Your Dog Homemade Birthday Treats

One thing that we love to do in our house is celebrate birthdays! We even celebrate our stuffed animals by celebrating the day we got them as their birthday. But one member of our family we especially like to celebrate is our dog Lola May. She is turning six today! Time to make some homemade birthday dog treats!

We started off scrolling through some recipes online to find the perfect recipe. When we realized that we had all of the ingredients in this recipe, we went right to work!

Use Safe Ingredients for your Dog Treats

In our research, we read over and over how important it is to use organic peanut butter, as you do not want to give your dog any toxins, or anything that could upset their stomach. My mom was particularly worried about this, as we happen to have a dog that has a very sensitive digestive system. (In other words, she throws up all over the place if she eats anything unusual, or for no reason at all come to think of it.)

I have to admit that the grossest part of making this was the pumpkin puree. I found the smell a bit hard to handle, but maybe it was because I had “dog” food on my mind.

Someone wanted to help clean the peanut butter off of my spoon.

We hand-mixed the first ingredients but found that it was much too dry to work on the counter as the recipe had said. So we ended up adding more water to make it come together.

Someone was getting excited as we worked! I think she knew we were making homemade birthday dog treats.

Water versus Pumpkin Puree?

After doubling the water, we put it out on the counter. This is when Mom walked by and groaned. It did look like quite a mess! It was almost like playing in the sand.

Maybe we needed more water before we dumped it? We ran into the same problem when making leftover chicken dog treats. As I was pushing these together, we ended up putting a few teaspoons of water on to make it come together. I think the next time we try this we would put more pumpkin puree into the mixture to avoid having to put so much water in.

My mom always laughs that after sixteen years of marriage, she has never upgraded her rolling pin. It lost its handles years and years ago, but it is so heavy we just push on it anyway.

My first rolling was a bit thick, so back to work. It was a lot of work to get this flat! A few times I had to push it back together where there were cracks, but since we had enough water, it was fine. All of that playing with Play-Doh when I was younger paid off.

Have Fun Making Dog Treat Shapes:

Next up was using our cookie cutter to make our shapes. We happen to have a quartzite countertop that does not scratch easily, but if you have a softer stone or laminate, we suggest you do this on a cutting board.

We were very careful in pulling the treats out of the dough and onto the pan. Mom had said that they would probably not expand as they were cooking, so we could put them close together.

This made a lot of treats! I had to put them on two different pans. After rolling these twice, I decided to just make some fun shapes for the last bit of dough.

This was a great way to celebrate Lola’s birthday. Do you have any traditions for your pets’ birthdays? We are going to be making a fresh batch of homemade rabbit treats for Al next.