DAWG Treats: Peanut Butter Dog Biscuit Recipe

It’s the day before the DAWG Spring Fling and volunteers all over Cork are hard at work baking dog treats for sale for our lovely stall, which will be packed with goodies for dogs and humans alike. In case you can’t make it on the day, we thought we’d share our favourite recipe for homemade, healthy, natural peanut butter dog treats you can make at home.

This recipe is very simple if you have a mixer and is one of those easy ‘what you cut is what you get’  biscuits to make because the treats do not rise. The results are smell divinely of peanut butter and are super tasty for dogs — you can even try them yourself!

This recipe makes about 60 treats using a 7.5cm bone shaped cookie cutter, though you can use any shape you like. An image gallery of all the steps for reference is at the bottom.

INGREDIENTS

• 400g Extra Coarse Wholemeal flour
• 50g Extra Coarse Wholemeal flour set aside
• 340g jar of smooth peanut butter
• 1 cup (250ml) water
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons honey (a tablespoon is 15ml or one of the large spoons in your cutlery drawer you never use for anything except soup and maybe ice cream)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder (5 ml, or a heaped scoop using the actual spoon you use to stir tea)

DIRECTIONS

• Heat oven to 175C
• In a mixer, combine 400g of flour, baking powder, and egg and mix
• Add peanut butter, water, honey and mix until a big dough ball forms in the mixer

At this point, you are likely to say ‘Doggone it, DAWG, this is a giant sticky unworkable ball of peanut butter!’  But that’s OK because we are going to carry on, adding more flour to get a good dough. (At this stage, you can include the optional step of knocking over your scales and discovering that yes, your dog will eat raw flour straight off the floor like it’s the BEST THING EVER….)

• Flour your worktop or rolling surface with the extra 50g of flour you set aside
• Scoop the dough out of the mixer and work the extra flour into the dough by hand until it forms well and isn’t sticking to the counter.
• Roll one half of the dough out on the counter to about 1 cm (just under 1/2 an inch)  thickness. You should not need to flour your rolling pin; if you do, your dough is too wet. Merge the dough halves together again and add more flour.
• Cut into shapes using any cookie cutter and place on a cookie sheet using a spatula
• Repeat with the other half of the dough
• Bake 20 minutes until browned (about 16 minutes in a fan-assisted oven)

When baked, you can lift them off the baking sheet and onto cooling racks by hand. Once cool, these treats will store in an air-tight container for 7 days… but dogs love them so much, there’s no chance they’ll last that long!

1 Ingredients

All the ingredients

2 Dough

Sticky mass in the mixer

3 Worked Dough

No longer sticks to surface

4 Cut Treats

Ready to go in the oven

5 Baked Treats

Baked (note browned bottoms)

6 Finished Treats

Packed and ready to eat!

This recipe is based on the Homemade Dog Treats recipe from The Cookie Rookie, converted to metric and altered for easier dough.