How To Make A Healthy Dog Birthday Cake

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:

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. When the sweet potato is finished, cut it open and allow it to cool.
4. Once the potato is cool, scoop out a little bit and put it on a plate.
5. Drizzle some honey (just a little bit) over the scooped out potato and then mash it together so it mixes in.
6. Shape the potato-honey mixture into a round, cake-like shape.
7. Crumble the bacon into small pieces over the cake.
8. 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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