Easy DIY Puppy Birthday Cake

In honor of Freyja, our French Bulldog and Australian Kelpie Mixed Puppy officially turning one, I wanted to do something special to celebrate her birthday (and us surviving a year with her). All jokes aside, I wanted to throw a little mini birthday party to celebrate her special day which of course had to involve a puppy birthday cake. 

I was scrolling online for a while in search of a puppy birthday cake. To be completely honest, homemade dog treats and food is always something that has interested me, but also intimidated me. However, for Freyja’s birthday, it was the best time to bite the bullet and make a DIY Puppy Birthday Cake for her.

This Puppy Birthday Cake is super easy and you probably already have all the ingredients already in your pantry. After scrolling on Pinterest for quite some time, I combined a few different Puppy Birthday Cake recipes with what I had already in the house. I was worried about the Puppy Birthday Cake not tasting that good, but then I remembered that Freyja will eat just about anything, so my audience wasn’t a real tough one to please. Needless to say, the cake actually turned out pretty good. After tasting it myself, it just tastes like healthy banana bread with no sugar, completely safe for human consumption, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend eating it yourself.  However, in Freyja’s mind, it was clearly to die for!

Also, please keep in mind, I am in no means a vet or a nutritionist for dogs so you should probably consult your vet to see if your puppy has any food allergies and tailor the recipe to that. 

After searching online, I found that peanut butter, bananas, carrot, and pumpkin were very common puppy birthday cake ingredients. I decided to combine some of those ingredients with some other ingredients like apple sauce, cinnamon, baking powder, maple syrup, and an egg which other recipes also included in their post as well.

A lot of the recipes called for whole wheat flour, which made me assume that probably traditional white all-purpose flour wasn’t the best to give to our pup. I found a couple of recipes that called for oat flour, so I decided that since we already had oats on hand, I would try to make some oat flour myself.

Making the oat flour was actually super easy. All I did was measure about half of a cup into my Nutribullet and ground the oats up until they were a flour-like consistency. This Nutribullet is under $50 and I’ve had it for years. It only took a couple of seconds to blend everything up which was so great and simple to do. Oat flour is definitely something I’ll start incorporating more in baking after how easy it was.

Another aspect of this puppy birthday cake that makes it so easy is that after grinding up the oat flour, you simply just have to combine all the ingredients together. I’ll leave the exact measurements I used at the bottom of this blog post.

It was really cute because Freyja was sitting outside of the kitchen watching me make this Puppy Birthday Cake like she knew it was for her and as you can tell from the photo, she was very, very excited to taste it.

When it comes to adding the banana, the riper the banana the better, just like if you were to make banana bread. If it’s not really ripe (without any black spots), it’ll be much harder to mash. This banana could have been a little riper, but with mashing it for about a minute, I got a nice consistency that I was happy with.

Instead of measuring out the carrot, I just eyed and grated about a half of a large carrot into the mixing bowl with the rest of the ingredients, but you can add as much carrot as you would like.

After all the ingredients were added, I just mixed everything up with a handheld mixer for about a minute or two. It didn’t take long for the batter to be a smooth consistency.

Once the batter was smooth consistency, I sprayed a muffin tin with coconut oil spray. If you have a little cake pan, I would use that, but as I didn’t, I just decided to use a muffin tin to create little cakes.

If you wanted to make cupcakes instead of a cake, you can easily do that as well with using the muffin tin. 

With this recipe, I was able to make 7 cupcakes. Since we were just making them for Freyja, we didn’t need many but I wanted to make a couple extra in case something went wrong. If you’re looking to feed more dogs or don’t need the extra, adjust your ingredients accordingly.

I then just placed the cupcakes in the oven at 350 degrees F or 175 C for about 15 minutes and then used a toothpick to check to see if it was done. When the toothpick came out completely clean, I knew it was fully cooked.

Once the cupcakes were in the oven baking, I made the frosting by just combining a tablespoon of peanut butter with a tablespoon of apple sauce. If your frosting is too thick, add just a little bit of water and mix it with a handheld mixer until smooth.

I then, added, my frosting to a Ziploc bag, or you can use a piping bag, to frost the birthday cakes. If you were to do cupcakes you’d want to do this step to do pretty frosting, but if you’re doing a layered cake, it’s not necessary as you can just spread the frosting on with a knife for each layer and it’ll essentially look the same.

Once the cupcakes were finished cooking. I set them on a cooling rack and waited for them to completely cool down. You definitely don’t want to add the frosting while the cake is still hot because then it’ll just completely melt off.

Once the cupcakes are cooled, because I wanted to build a three-layer small birthday cake, I cut the tops off of the cupcakes to create a mostly flat surface to stack the cakes. It wasn’t perfect, but with the frosting, it covered up any imperfections anyways.

After cutting the tops off of a handful of muffins, I added the frosting to create different layers. I also frosted some cupcakes as is, so you can decide which style you like best and go with that.

The final product is a very cute little puppy-friendly birthday cake or cupcake. Perfect for your puppy’s birthday and definitely delicious!

I decided to add some puppy-friendly “chocolate chips” to the top of the birthday cake just to add some decoration. You can add a mini dog bone, which I think would be absolutely adorable, but I was unable to find any at my local grocery store.

 

When everything was completed, it was time to let Freyja see her birthday cake and celebrate. We celebrated with a few balloons, confetti, and a couple new toys! She absolutely loved her birthday cake and ate it so fast once she was allowed to.

I was also able to see that our training with Freyja was clearly paid off with her patience and not gobbling the cake down as soon as she saw it.

She did sneak a lick here and there before we gave the “okay” for her to eat her cake, but it looks so tasty, I can’t blame her for that! 

It was definitely a hit with Freyja and I hope your puppy enjoys their birthday cake too! It was super easy to make and definitely made the little celebration we had feel extra special!

Have you ever thrown a birthday party for your pup or tried to make homemade dog treats before? Let me know in the comments down below!