Peanut Butter and Bacon Dog Treats
Today we’re going to make something for our canine friends as a special Christmas treat. This recipe is really fast and easy to whip up and the dough is easily maleable so you can shape it and color it however you like or you can roll it out and cut fun shapes out. I like to make this recipe after I’ve made bacon for breakfast as it uses up the grease and I am a big fan of preventing food waste and getting the most use out of every food I buy. So after you’ve treated yourself and your family to bacon this morning, why not try whipping this up for your pup?
While I have not ever tried these beauties, judging by the way my dog gobbles them down, I'd say they're a real winner in the taste category. There's lots of recipes that I particularly enjoy making as gifts for loved ones, but none quite as much as this. Whenever I start to prepare the dough, my dog recognizes the unique smell combination that is bacon grease and peanut butter, and comes running into the kitchen and excitedly watches me prepare them. A bit of context here: this is a unique thing, to see my dog run or to even see her excited for food, after a bout with would-be fatal bone cancer that she managed to survive, she never really runs or gets riled up and excited about anything. So seeing her come running into the kitchen and jump up and down as she tries to wait for these treats is a particularly special experience for me. I also, sadly, only get to see my dog, Moustache, once or twice a year, as she lives with my family in New York. I feel very guilt about leaving her, that it makes me happy to know that I am leaving her with a full tupperware of tasty treats.
So if you've got a dog, tell him or her to start drooling, because I'm about to show you how to make these deliciously bad boys:
Peanut Butter and Bacon Dog Treats
1 3/4 cups whole wheat or all purpose flour
1 egg
1/4 cup bacon grease
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup water
Unlike most baked goods recipes, this one is very simple and forgiving. There's no fancy order to stirring up these ingredients, stir them all together at once. If your bacon grease has been chillin in the fridge for a while, I highly recommend heating it up a bit so it stirs in easier.
Once you've mixed your ingredients up, pop them in the fridge for at least 30 minutes so that the dough can firm up a bit. Then you can either roll the cookies out with a rolling pin and stamp or cut out whatever shapes you like. It also absorbs gel food dye really well, so you can mix some dye into the treats before you roll it out. For these, I wanted to make little candy canes, so I made half my dough blue and left the other half plain. Then I rolled out the dough into thin cylinders, about 1/2 inch thick, cut 4 inch segments of each dough strand and twisted them together, to make the candy cane pattern.
Bake them at 375 degrees Farenheit for 20-25 minutes and then let them cool before giving to your dog. But I'm warning you, these treats are delicious so if you try to take an adorable photo of your dog sweetly and gently nibbling on one of these... good luck! You'll go from an adorable dog that normally looks like this:
To a cross-eyed blurry dog-beast that ever so gleefully looks like this:
Hopefully your pups enjoy them as much as Moustache did. Let me know how your dog treat adventures go. Feel free to download and use this illustrated version of the recipe, and forgive me for its crudeness, this is my first time drawing digitally, so I'm still getting my Surface Book sea legs.
