Baking dog treats for fun and profit

By DUANE NOLLEN
The Oskaloosa Herald

OSKALOOSA January 15, 2008 01:41 pm

— Victoria Laird has taken the task of baking pet treats for her dogs and horses and made it into an at-home business — Ultimate Pet Cookies.
Laird has been making pet cookies for about six years. She said there are pet treat food stores in Iowa City and Des Moines, but the travel time is not worth it.
“I’m not going to drive to Iowa City or Des Moines to buy dog treats,” she said.
Laird, author of the natural foods cookbook “America’s Favorites Naturally,” adopted some of her recipes to make them pet friendly.
“I took all of my favorite recipes from when I was a kid and modified them,” she said.
As an example, Laird uses whole wheat and honey instead of sugar and white flower.
For horse treats, Laird uses corn, oats, apples, molasses and pumpkin. She avoids using eggs or wheat to avoid digestive problems. She also avoids using salt in the animal recipes since salt is not good for dogs.
Laird said she can find many of the ingredients — such as carob, carob chips and rice flour — at health food stores.
Laird also adjusts the baking time for her pet treats.
“I bake them longer ... they’re drier,” she said.
Laird said she bakes the cookies for about 15 minutes and then turns down the oven heat to 200 degrees and bakes the cookies for another hour until they are dry but not brown.
“They love them,” Laird said of her dogs — Sophie, an English Golden Retriever, and Wilson, a Golden Retriever.
Sophie and Wilson are Laird’s eager taste testers.
Here are some of the treats Laird makes:
• Carob From Heaven Dog Cookies, (the Ultimate cookie reward!) which looks like a double chocolate chip cookie, but is made entirely from unsweetened carob and carob chips, with no cocoa or sugar products at all.
• Peanut Butter Hugs Dog Cookies. Crisscrossed just like the human variety, with lots of fresh peanut butter and a vanilla accent. Sugar free.
• Hearts Forever Dog Cookies, with a lemon and cinnamon accent and shaped liked hearts. Sugar free.
• For My Pumpkin Horse Cookies (these are suitable and adored by dogs as well). Wheat free and contains fresh pureed pumpkin, corn, oats, honey, molasses and a touch of cinnamon. Sugar free.
Friday afternoon, Laird experimented with baking and frosting some Valentines Day treats for her dogs.
Her Hearts Forever Dog Cookies use whole wheat flour, honey, soybean oil, eggs, lemon juice, vanilla, baking powder and cinnamon.
Laird had baked a batch of the cookies and was ready to frost them Friday afternoon. She used almond bark frosting and yogurt chips for the cookies and decided to experiment with adding strawberry juice to add some color and flavor.
“The strawberry juice is giving it a different texture,” Laird said as she mixed the frosting. Much to her chagrin, the strawberry juice was making the frosting a bit lumpy.
“No more strawberry juice,” Laird said. “The pink is going to have to come from food coloring.”
To compensate, Laird decided to use the somewhat lumpy frosting to make crème-filled cookies. She made some heart-shaped crème filled cookies as well as crème-filled bone cookies.
“The strawberries and almond bark tastes really good. It’s too bad it didn’t work out,” she said.
Although Laird was disappointed with the results of the experiment, Sophie and Wilson were quite pleased with them.
“The dogs still think they’re pretty awesome,” she said. “My dogs get the ones not good enough to market and that’s fine with them.”
Laird said she likes to experiment with treat ideas. She has been baking since she was a girl.
“It’s fun to think of different types of cookies a person could make,” she said.
Laird said the pet cookies are a treat for her dogs who get one small cookie three times a day. She saves the horse cookies to reward her two Arabian horses for good behavior.
For Laird, this is a side business. She is a part-time art instructor at William Penn University. She began making the pet treats for her own pets as well as the pets of colleagues and friends. She just began taking treats to H & S Feeds in Oskaloosa. In the future, she plans to expand her business and take the treats to nearby towns.
“I sell more dog cookies. Horse cookies are not as common as dog cookies,” Laird said. There are four varieties of horse cookies and dozens of varieties of dog cookies, she added.
Herald Editor Duane Nollen can be reached by email at oskynews@oskyherald.com

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