Pumpkin and spice, and everything nice, these doggie biscuits are sure to elicit loads of tail wags and butt wiggles, and they’re so easy to make (and SO much cheaper than pricey good quality dog treats) that they might just have you wagging and wiggling about as well. During the holiday season we’re so busy running around, and our schedule is so out of the ordinary, it can really put a strain on our furry little wolf monsters, why not toss some of these their way to make up for that a little, i mean, i know MY poopsie is happy to get extra noms whenever he can. Also, you can feel good knowing it’s packed with healthy good stuff, full of protein, and isn’t just empty calories, what more can you ask of a delicious treat?!
The ingredients here are pretty simple, oat flour makes up the base and helps to bind things together as well, besan (chickpea flour) knocks up the protein and helps to balance out some of the missing aminos from the oats, pumpkin provides our liquid, plus it’s full of good nutrients and an excellent source of prebiotic fiber-y stuff that is good for their digestion. Cinnamom, clove, and ginger provide a tasty flavour boost and also help support good digestion and a little breath freshening power, oil helps to keep the biscuits from being too hard as well as providing some much needed fat to help with nutrient assimilation. Finally there is just a bit of baking powder, this help them rise every so slightly, giving the biscuits a crunchy puff and keeping them from being tiny little flat rocks. (don’t worry, it’s just a bit and doesn’t add a ton of sodium, if your fuzzy companion is on a super strict low sodium diet, you can leave this out)
Everything is simply mixed together into a dough that should be tacky, cohesive and hold together, but breaks apart rather easily. If you find it’s too crumbly to roll out, simply sprinkle with a little water and knead in, and if it’s too wet, simply add some more oat or besan until it’s dry enough to use. The dough gets rolled out the 6mm | 1/4 inch thick, using starch as a dusting to keep it from sticking to everything (it’s very tacky), docked (pricked with holes) and cut into whatever shapes you’d like. Now you can use extra oat or besan flour to dust for rolling, BUT the starch works much much better, it doesn’t get sticky and doesn’t readily absorb into the mix, any starch will do here, we like using potato or tapioca (mostly because they’re the cheapest and the ones we usually have the most of), but corn, wheat, or arrowroot all work just fine. You can brush off any extra starch pretty easy (an actual brush works well for this) or leave it on, the poopsies won’t care.
Make sure you dock your dough before cutting, either with a dough docker or a fork, this helps to speed up the drying a little, and prevents them from puffing up too much. Having said that, if you’re in some crazy rush, you CAN skip this, you may end up with some rather funny shaped biscuits and you might have to dry them a tad longer to get them evenly dry, but they’ll still be yum. Like i said before, you can cut them up to whatever shape and size you want, we did about half of ours with small cookie cutters and half with just a pizza roller, our furballs don’t seem to care which shapes they get, as long as they’re getting them into their bellies.
At this point you just pop them onto a parchment lined baking sheet (or sheets) in a single layer and bake for half an hour, the tops won’t really change colour much (they actually get a little lighter while baking) but when you flip them over you’ll see how nicely browned they are. When they’re done they’ll already be quite firm and dry, at this point you’re going to flip them all over (you can do this quickly with your fingers or with a spatula or bench scraper) and place them back in your oven (with the heat turned off), prop the door open slightly (handle of a wooden spoon works well) and allow them to cool completely in the oven, the residual heat will help to finish drying them out so you won’t have to worry about spoilage anytime soon. We like to keep whatever we think we’ll use up in two weeks in a tightly closed jar, and keep the rest in the freezer (tightly sealed) to make sure they stay fresh.
Now go make some delicious noms for your favorite adoring critters, they deserve it and this is so easy that it sorta makes you a bad person if you don’t…..yeah, i said it.