By One of the ‘trendy’ toys Petsmart recommended for Buddy, my recent adoption, was the pupsicle. I envisioned hours/days of entertainment for my furry friend as he figured out how to get to the treat secured inside the rubber container. Buddy saw it as an opportunity to exercise his jaws. While I’m determined to keep using it, it is probably in its last days of existence.
How it looks out of the box:
What is looks like now:
I bought some pupsicle balls, but was determined to make my own a la Martha Stewart. My sweet Mavis in her latter years was eating prescription dog food along with canned pumpkin puree. What you may not know but canned pumpkin is a seasonal item, and nearly impossible to find outside of the months of Fall. So any time I saw in the grocery store, I would stock up. Perhaps a little too much…because I have almost an entire shelf of canned pumpkin puree in my pantry. I love Pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread, but there’s no way I can bake and eat that much pumpkin…so I did some googling for pumpkin pupsicle recipes and got very annoyed!
The recipes in general are easy to follow, that’s not the issue. The issue is the amounts. Most of the recipes I was looking at called for 1 cup of pumpkin…well that leaves you with 1 cup in the can that will sit in your refrigerator until it starts growing things and you toss it in the bin(no picture of that). Sooo I decided to make my own recipe using all of the pumpkin can. Here’s an interesting nugget for you. Pumpkin cans are no longer 16 oz. Every single pumpkin can in my pantry is 15 oz…which means recipes passed down over the years probably call for a can of pumpkin but may end up tasting less pumpkin-y because the manufacturers are shrinking the cans.
Anyway I can’t double the recipe exactly, because then I’d be short on pumpkin. I was in no mood to do fancy math, so this is me winging it.
Ingredients
- 1 can of pumpkin puree
- 1 cup peanut butter (xylitol-free – whatever that is…I couldn’t find any peanut butter with this ingredient, but several recipes were freaked out about that ingredient)
- 1 cup plain yoghurt (I used Greek yoghurt – finding plain yoghurt was more challenging than expected)
- dog treats
Steps
- line your muffin tins or spritz with Pam (I’ve done both and haven’t figured out which is better)
- Mix three ingredients together
- Scoop out
- Add a treat on top for fun
- Freeze
This recipe made 1 1/2 dozen mini-muffin pupsicles and 3 ‘regular’ cupcake size.
