Vegan Mofo VI-Day 25: Doggone Delicious

My dogs won't stay still so I stacked them around my coaster.

My pup is four years old and today is the first time I've ever made her treats. I always plan to make her a little cake or something to celebrate our anniversary but I've yet to follow through. Luckily I do meet all my other obligations so I don't think she even knows to be concerned about homemade treats so long as she's getting treats.

These are "Peanut Butter Dog Treats" from Chloe's Kitchen. I had other recipes I wanted to try, but I couldn't find them. I decided to make these to use up some of the whole wheat flour I bought to make tortillas a few weeks ago. The ingredients were really simple. Flour, peanut butter, black strap molasses and water. There is an option to dip them in melted carob chips, which I would like to try another time. I need to hit up the bulk bins for that though. The only thing I didn't have was black strap molasses so I used regular. When I have money to burn I will splurge on some black strap. I mostly used natural peanut butter but I had to steal a bit of regular from my family because I used most of mine up on yesterday's peanut butter cups.

I wasn't able to press the dough into 1/4" thickness with my hands. I had to use a rolling pin. I think I didn't leave my peanut butter out long enough for it to soften. I have had bone cookie cutters for a while so I was excited to finally use them. I probably could have cut them larger but since most of the dogs I know are small, I decided to stick to the instructions and get about 50 smaller sized biscuits. Now that I know Penny loves them I can do a round of larger ones just for her. I tried one and thought it needed more peanut butter and a touch of salt, but I have more taste buds than my dogs.

Believe it or not, it wasn't my first time eating a dog biscuit. When we were kids, I foolishly asked my brother what was for dinner and he said, "dog biscuits, try one." Because I was stupid and did most things my brother told me to, I did. It was a pink milk-bone and from what I can remember it wasn't that bad. Of course now I take everything he says with a grain of salt.

Vegan Mofo VI- Day 23: My Cups Runneth Over!

I thought I would be really lazy and just make some Peanut Butter Cups today. As much as I love pb and chocolate together I've never made my own pb cups until today. What an experience! There isn't really so much work involved as there is waiting. Some finesse would also be good, but as long as you aren't serving these to anyone too snobbish I don't think they'll care if they look less than perfect. It's the though that counts, right?

The recipe in Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites is meant to yield 12 standard muffin sized pb cups. Because I am a pain in the butt, I chose to use Halloween mini cupcake liners and do smaller pb cups. I thought they would be cuter and hopefully survive longer. I forgot that this meant it would also take twice as long to make them. I should have tried doing regular size first so I would have the basic skills down. I didn't go far enough up the sides so there is a gap on almost all of these. You have to be careful when biting into one since the filling oozes out, not that it's a bad thing, just unexpected. I did wait the full hour before trying them so maybe the pb I used takes longer to set or I just put way too much pb in them. I'll know better for the future, but this was a decent first effort. I'd like to try again with a different peanut butter, maybe a crunchy version!