Happy Holidays!

Every year I put together some little gifts for my clients as we enter the holiday season.   This year I thought I would try to capture some of what goes into those gifts. To start, I had to get all of my ingredients together.  As you can see, all of the ingredients are human grade and organic.  So these treats are off to a good start and chances are they'll be pretty tasty although Lola and Gus aren't very discerning taste testers so it can be difficult to judge by their reaction.

All Human Grade Ingredients

Over the next couple of days I mixed up three different kinds of dough.  "Couple of days?" you say? Well yes ... As it turns out making hundreds of dog treats from scratch is a fairly time intensive process so I had to spread my baking out over a few days so that I could fit other activities into my life ... like getting out of the house to actually walk the pups these treats were for.

MMMMMMM .... Yummy!

The dough for the tuna treats and the cheese treats was really good for rolling out into fun shapes ... so that's what I did!!  Hearts for the cheese treats and stars for the tuna treats.  So cute!  As you can see, I also learned my lesson after fighting with the tuna dough on my counter and set down parchment paper for the cheese dough.  Over the last several weeks as I've prepared treats for both my human and canine friends I've come to the realization that parchment paper is one of the greatest inventions of all time.  ♥

Smushy Stars

Lots of Love

Now it was time for the treats to bake.  Much the same as I learned that parchment paper is lovely, I have known for some time that you can also substitute aluminum foil for it on a baking sheet to speed up your clean up process.  And believe me, I'll take all the help I can get in the cleaning department.  It also makes for pretty pictures.

Toasty Stars!

Looking Good!

And then the treats were stored in an airtight container to make sure that they remained fresh for when they finally reached the pups.

Millions of Stars ... Ok, maybe it just felt like millions

And finally they needed to be packaged up nicely to be presented to the families (God bless The Container Store).

From the feedback I've gotten from my clients I would say that these were a big hit with the pups.  Maybe if I start making them more often, I'll become more efficient and be able to do it more than once a year.