Recipe: Pumpkin Peanut Butter Dog Treats

Photo credit: Dogtipper.com

Have you got your Christmas baking list ready? How about some treats for your furry best friend?

Store-bought dog treats are expensive and filled with hard-to-pronounce ingredients, so we've started to bake our own cookies for our pooches. Homemade cookies are way cheaper than their store-bought counterparts, and you most likely already have in your pantry all the ingredients to make these cookies. The even better news is that these cookies are delicious. My dogs can't get enough of these treats and will come racing whenever I approach the counter where they are stored.

The dough for this recipe is easy to handle and is healthy, with the addition of pumpkin* and peanut butter, both of which my dogs love to eat right off the spoon. The dough is not sticky and comes together quickly and is super-easy to roll out. Additionally, the dough doesn't spread when baked, so you can cram lots of unbaked cookies on one cookie sheet. I've even substituted the peanut butter in the recipe with bacon fat with lots of positive feedback from my dogs and from friends' dogs, too.

Pumpkin Peanut Butter Dog Treats
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 large eggs
2/3 cup pumpkin purée, canned or fresh
3 tbsp. peanut butter

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place all ingredients in the mixing bowl and stir until the dough comes together and looks like a bunch of little dough balls. If you pinch a piece and it crumbles, add a little water. If it’s really sticky, it’s too wet, and you’ll need to add a little flour. Gather the dough together and form into a ball. Place on a lightly floured work surface and roll it out to about 1/4-inch thickness. You can use either a cookie cutter to cut out cute shapes or a knife to cut squares or strips—I prefer to use a cookie cutter just because it makes the cookies look so cute!

Gather the scraps together and roll them out again and again until you've used up the dough. Place the cookies on a baking sheet. They can be crowded pretty close together since they don’t expand much. Bake 15-20 minutes for softer treats or 30 minutes for hard treats. (My dogs like crunchy treats, and they last longer that way, too.) Keep a close eye on your cookies after 20 minutes. If they were rolled out too thinly, they will burn if they're baked the entire 30 minutes. Let cool completely.

Recipe from Use Real Butter

Did you know that pumpkin is a solution to two common doggie problems—diarrhea and constipation? It's a great natural remedy to both, so the next time your dog has either, start with a teaspoon of pumpkin and gradually work up to two teaspoons or a tablespoon until he's back to his normal self.