Homemade Dog Treats

My family really loves dogs. I mean, really, really loves dogs. So much so that my mom decided they deserved homemade treats just like the rest of us! 

Homemade with Love!

 Thanks to Pinterest and my mom's philosophy that anything could and should be homemade, we decided to try our hand at homemade dog treats. A little google search lead us to countless options, but luckily one of the first few looked promising, requiring a lot of stuff you usually have on hand! 

There are a lot of pups in my family. If my sister and I are both at our parents' house, there will be at least 5 dogs, possibly more depending on if any other family is in town or around. Some holidays we have 10 or 11 running around. Anyway, it was a good gamble on my mom's part to double the recipe. Represented here is the original recipe (not doubled).

Ingredients:

½ cups water (add more water later if needed)
½ cup oil
2 eggs
3 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tsp. vanilla
2 cups flour
½ cup cornmeal
½ cup oats 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Mix wet ingredients. Combine dry ingredients, then mix with the wet mixture, forming a ball of dough. Use a rolling pin and a floured surface to reach a uniform thickness; cut out treats with biscuit or cookie cutters. Spray a cookie sheet with olive oil (I recommend the Pampered Chef spray bottle) and line with treats. Bake for 20 minutes, or until beginning to brown; treats should be crisp and hard. Store in airtight container.

My mom had just picked up a set of cookie cutters shaped like dog bones! 

Bone-shaped cookie cutters in a variety of sizes, from Kitchen Collection.

I recently saw on Pinterest that you can use a four-pronged fork to make the little holes in the bone, but I didn't realize until I was done that the fork I picked out was slightly bent...

You can see that the prongs are crooked if you look closely
at the completed bone above the one with the fork in it.

I am absolutely awful with a rolling pin, so my mom successfully rolled out the dough. And yes, that is aluminum foil below the dough and flour- a cheap attempt at containing the mess. This method was decently successful, but still required some cleanup, and a fresh piece of foil before re-rolling the dough for the second round.

This was a good thickness, leaving the treats perfectly toasted and cooked thoroughly.

 Below is a finished cookie tray full of dog treats: 

I forgot to poke the decorative holes in this batch... :(

After all was said and done, the dogs absolutely loved the treats! I mean, my dogs love anything you hand-feed them, but they went crazy over these! It's worth mentioning that one of my mom's spoiled little pups, Roxy, thought that a dog treat warm out of the oven just was not acceptable, she would only eat hers at room temperature, so watch out for overly-sensitive dogs :P

Oh, and- fun fact- these treats are edible for humans... but I wouldn't really recommend it. My dad just had to try one. He didn't spit it out, but he didn't finish it, either. The amount of sugar in the peanut butter is negligible once everything is mixed together, it does not taste like a peanut butter oatmeal cookie. Sorry. But, don't tell the dogs! 

Rambo loves treats. Disclaimer: that is a store-bought treat in his mouth.