Sawyer's 4th birthday is tomorrow, so we're having his birthday bash today. This is his first birthday party with friends, so we wanted everything to be perfect. The past 3 years, I've made a coconut cake for him and he just gets to have a piece. This year--because we're having other canine friends over--I decided to make dog-friendly cupcakes for Sawyer and his canine companions. Originally I was just going to take a dog cookie recipe that I have and adapt it into cupcakes, but I couldn't find my book! So instead, I looked up some recipes online that used the ingredients I already had in the house. I just did a google search and found this recipe.
What I used:
2 cups shredded carrots
2/3 cup natural applesauce (unsweetened)
3 eggs
2 tsp. cinnamon
3 cups oat flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
Frosting (these are approximations)
2 cups plain yogurt
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup meringue powder
How I did it:
First I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. I had baby carrots in the fridge, so I used a food processor to shred them. I had bought them for Justin's salads next week and wound up using most of the bag--oops!
I combined the shredded carrots with the eggs and applesauce in a large mixing bowl and set it aside. It was a little runny but it was with good purpose.
The original recipe calls for whole wheat flour, but I didn't have any, and I can never find it in the grocery store. Instead of using regular flour (which is one of the 1,000 things Sawyer's brother, Kirby, is allergic to), I always throw oats in the food processor and grind them to a fine flour-like consistency. You can see (in the picture below) that I processed more than 3 cups, so unfortunately I had to throw about 1/2 cup away. It's always sad throwing away food!
I added the cinnamon and the regular oats to the oat-flour mixture. After that was well-mixed, I combined the wet and dry ingredients--being sure to add the dry ingredients to the wet slowly. The mixture turned paste-like, so I added just a bit more applesauce to make it more like batter.
I liked the idea of small cupcakes for the dogs, so I used my mini-muffin tin to make mini-cupcakes. The batter still wasn't as runny as regular cupcake batter, but the original recipe said it would be "thick," so I went with it. These cupcakes don't rise, so I filled the pan up to the top.
After making one tray of the mini-cupcakes, I wanted to make a few regular sized, so I used the rest of the dough to make a dozen doggy cupcakes.
They mini-cupcakes baked for about 13 minutes, and the larger cupcakes baked for 25. I let them cool overnight so I could figure out how to do the icing.
I had read somewhere before that you could use meringue powder in yogurt to thicken it up to use as icing. I did a trial-and-error with the yogurt and powder--adding peanut butter to really get it to thicken up. I used an icing piper to get just enough onto each cupcake.
I added coconut on top to keep the feel of Sawyer's original birthday cake--plus these cupcakes don't have any sugar in them, and I wanted to give the dogs a special treat!
I have some cupcakes set out for the party, but I've also created these doggy bags for the canine guests. Inside there is a to-go cupcake, some dog treats, and an extra special dog toy.
The rating:
I gave Sawyer and Kirby an un-iced cupcake last night, and they loved it! The real taste test will be when the party guests arrive. I wouldn't recommend that any human guests try these cupcakes. Like I said, they don't have sugar in them, and plain yogurt doesn't really taste good.
Hope everything goes off tonight without a hitch!
Oh, and P.S.! Humans are getting cupcakes too--coconut cupcakes! I didn't experiment with those though. I cheated and used a box and pre-made whipped icing. They still look fantastic though!
Wonderful job.
ReplyDelete