This is Frank.
Frank is our dog. Frank is often found snoozing in the sun, chewing something (hopefully something that he is allowed to chew) or asking if he can go for a walk.
It is very hard to say no to Frank. Just look at that face, can you say no to that?
Frank loves snacks. I love Frank. So it's always a good time to whip up a batch of Frank's favorite cookies. I could give you a song and dance about how, by making Frank cookies, I know exactly what I am feeding my dog. After all, I care about what I eat, so shouldn't I care about what he eats?
But, listen, if left to my own devices, I would probably eat like a nine year old left alone in a 7-11. So as long as what Frank is eating isn't poison and doesn't make his potty time a nightmare, I'm not that concerned. His vet says he's healthy as can be. I just like to bake things and spoil the dog.
A friend pointed me to this recipe for homemade dog treats. Frank loves them, I love the excuse to use all of the cookie cutters I have but never get into. There are always a few in the fridge. I do make one adjustment, I replace an egg in the recipe with a quarter cup of unsweetened applesauce.
Everyday cookies are great, but holiday cookies are better. Purim begins tomorrow evening. Purim is a holiday with a great cookie component – hamantaschen. I wrote about my misadventures in trying to bake a batch of finicky yeast dough hamantaschen and my follow up with a standard, successful cookie dough based batch yesterday. We are all set on the people hamantaschen front over here.
But I love to include Frank in holiday merriment. I probably won't make him wear a costume but, as I was recounting my hamantaschen attempts to some friends, one remarked that I should make Frank some "pawmantaschen."
I laughed, and then I considered the recipe I already use for Frank cookies. It is sufficiently like a sugar cookie dough in temperament to stand up to filling and folding. While hamantaschen for people typically have jams as fillings, there are plenty of people who mix it up with peanut butter and I have a quickly aging banana on hand (Frank's favorite bananas are old and sweet). I set to work to see what would happen if I followed through and did the thing.
I should be clear that "what would happen if I did this?" is a pretty significant motivator in my life. If there is a cohesive theme to this blog it's probably, I thought about something a lot and then decided "what the heck, I'm going to try that."
Because of the folding, I rolled the dough a bit thinner than I typically do, to about 1/6 of an inch. The circles I cut were just under three inches diameter, smaller than my regular hamantaschen. The filling is simply a dollop of peanut butter and a piece of banana. I considered blending them together, but that wouldn't be very HAHM of me.
A quick reminder that, if you are giving peanut butter to your best pupper, you should make sure that it doesn't have any artificial sweeteners. In particular, avoid anything with Xylitol, it's poison to dogs. I like to find the peanut butter with the very fewest number of ingredients.
The folding method I prefer for Hamantaschen is the one that Tori Avey shows in a great pictorial detail here. I am happy to report that it works just as well on the pup version. I did choose to pop the cookie sheet into the fridge for 15 minutes before baking the pawmantaschen. As with the buttery cookie dough version that I made for us, that time in the cold firms up the peanut butter and makes the dough stiffer. This helps the shape hold up to the heat when it lands in the oven. As I haven't tried this without the step of the fridge, I can't say for sure that skipping this step would cause any structural weakness.
So that's it. I got the idea of pawmantaschen stuck in my head. I turned it around in there for hours and decided that it was totally a feasible undertaking. I do love it when these things work out. So now, tomorrow evening, as we are merry and nosh our hamantaschen, Frank can join in and nosh his pawmantaschen. Maybe he'll even let me dress him up as Mordechai.
By the way, if you'd like to learn more about the holiday of Purim, here's a place to start.
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