Yesterday was my Weiland baby’s third birthday (which means he’s “21″ in dog years), and even though I know he doesn’t really understand how important of a day it is, I still like to do something to celebrate. My husband and I had plans to take him to the dog park, but then it poured all day long. Buckets of rain made it a little impossible to do much of anything outside.
We did buy him a couple new toys and a life jacket, which he’ll need for when we go fishing off a boat this summer. But that’s wasn’t enough for me to feel like we really celebrated his birthday.
Plus it’s just not a birthday without some kind of cake.
Cakes For Dogs?
Yes, there are recipes all over the web to help you make the perfect dog-friendly cake (or pupcake or cookies or treats, etc), but they’re loaded with ingredients I don’t think dogs should eat.
I know it was his birthday so a little “junk food” is OK, except I don’t like to feed my boy junk. He eats one of the healthiest dog foods on the market, his treats contain less than two ingredients and he drinks a ton of water.
But it was his birthday and I think that’s the one day a year everyone is allowed to indulge, including dogs. Yet I still couldn’t convince myself to make him a cake that had flour and baking powder and other baking-type ingredients, because a dog would never eat that in wild.
I try my best to only feed him things he’d come across if he was a wild dog living out in the world on his own (not that there are many Toy Poodles roaming free, but you know what I mean!).
A Whole Food Solution
Rather than skip the birthday cake altogether, I used some creativity to come up with a cake that would still be pleasing to Weiland, would seem like something you’d give a dog for his birthday and would also let me feel good allowing him to eat it.
What I came up with was a sweet potato “cake” with drizzled honey and crumbled bacon on top.
Needless to say, Weiland devoured it so quickly I almost wasn’t able to get a picture of him with it!
If you want to make your dog a special birthday treat, but without all the crap ingredients, here’s the “recipe” for the cake I made Weiland:
Ingredients
- a small baked sweet potato (or a larger one if you have a big dog)
- half a piece of bacon (or a whole one for a larger dog)
- a tiny bit of honey (optional)
Here’s what you do:
- Cook the baked sweet potato in the microwave (I don’t usually recommend microwave cooking because I feel it depletes important nutrients in food, but I also didn’t want to spend an hour baking it in the oven.)
- In the meantime, get a pan hot on the stove and then add the piece of bacon. Cook until it’s no longer raw, then put it on a couple sheets of paper towel to drain off some of the grease.
- When the sweet potato is finished, cut it open and allow it to cool.
- Once the potato is cool, scoop out a little bit and put it on a plate.
- Drizzle some honey (just a little bit) over the scooped out potato and then mash it together so it mixes in.
- Shape the potato-honey mixture into a round, cake-like shape.
- Crumble the bacon into small pieces over the cake.
- Add a candle and celebrate!
I know Weiland is “just a dog” to some people, but to me he’s my baby and the little love of my life, so I’m ultra super protective about what goes into his body. I can’t control everything (after all, he eats things off the floor/ground that I don’t always know about), but when I can control it, I do.
After all, dogs deserve to be healthy too.
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