Time to put up the Christmas decorations! We’ve been sharing lots of different holiday treats in our barkmas bonanza, including using cute Christmas plunger cookie cutters to make special gingerbread dog treats, carob and peanut butter dog treats, and spicy apple dog treats. Here’s a bonus post for those of you who’d love to make a patterned treat, but can’t get your hands on a set of Christmas plunger cutters. Let have some fun and make homemade Christmas ornament dog treats without using special cookie cutters, plungers, or stamps. Woofs!
Stamping Treats
The Advantages of Stamping
Stamping the patterns into your treats, whether with a patterned plunger cookie cutter (affiliate link), cookie stamp (affiliate link), or by hand, is an easy way to dress up special dog treats. The finished treats look fancy, but are still freezer-friendly and suitable for gift packaging or pocket portability for treats on the go. There are no extra ingredients, no icing effort or set time, and much less mess, which is great if the kids are helping out. Since you can use any roll-and-cut dog treat dough with no extra toppings, it’s also a great way to make a fancy treat for a dog with allergies or special dietary sensitivities using your favourite safe recipe. You can use these stamping techniques to make cookies for your favourite humans too, if you’d like! Remember to switch the treat dough recipes, though. Haha!
Choosing a Base Dough
Stamped dog treats can be made using any roll-and-cut dog treat dough. You’ll get better impressions on a smooth cohesive dough and it’s best to avoid chunky or speckled ingredients that may distract from the stamped patterns. See our post on decorating homemade dog treats for more information and helpful tips.
Stamping Tools
Dough can be stamped with any clean food-safe items. Your imagination is the limit! Patterned plunger cutters are easy and fast. However, one advantage (other than not needing special cutters) to stamping or stencilling your own designs is that you don’t need to as fussy about the dough consistency or rolling thickness as you do with plungers since there is no pattern release to worry about. Yay!
Shapes and Sizes
Since you are not restricted to a ready-made plunger cutter for size and thickness, hand stamped treats are also easier to custom size to suit you and your pets. I usually break big dog treats into smaller pieces (blog photos not withstanding) no matter what size they are. That way, my spotty piglets more individual treats for the same calorie intake. Everyone’s definition of bite sized is different. Just ask Oli!
Making Hand Stamped Christmas Ornament Dog Treats
How To Make Simple Stamped Ornament Dog Treats
To make Christmas ornament dog treats like those pictured in this post, you can use a biscuit cutter (round or fluted), ornament cookie cutter, or any round food safe object to cut circles. Drinking glasses make an easy substitution.
Making the Treats:
- Preheat the oven and mix the dough according to your chosen recipe.
- Roll the dough, then cut to shape and place on a prepared baking sheet.
- Stamp with decorative patterns – your imagination is the limit. I have to say, it’s pretty fun!
- Chill if needed for your chosen recipe, and then bake according to recipe.
- Cool before serving and storage.
Techniques and Tools Used Making the Pictured Treats
The Christmas ornament dog treats shown in this post were created with simple round biscuit cutters. I decorated the treat by stamping and pressing patterns onto the surface using other readily available items from my kitchen, like we did with our fun and fancy Easter egg dog treats. To decorate the ornaments, I used a pasta/pastry wheel for the wiggly lines, toothpicks for the dots (point end small, blunt end large), and added a few extra shapes with other cookie/fondant plungers from my baking stash.
For a little extra pizzaz on the ornaments (and added flavour) I reserved a bit of the dough when cutting the circles. I mixed in some carob powder and used a little fondant cutter and toothpick to create the brown toppers. Totally optional, of course! You could make a small hole, if you wish, like we did for our gold medal dog treats, but I wouldn’t recommend hanging treats on your tree. I can only imagine the tree crashing chaos that would cause. Oh my… My boys were wild enough about the inaccessible mantle when we had our DIY dog treat wreath.
Similar simple hand stamping techniques would also be very cute with Christmas tree treats. Just swap the biscuit cutters for a tree-shaped cookie cutter. You can use coloured extras for ornaments or stars too, if you’d like!
Hungry for more tasty treats? There are all sorts of homemade dog treat ideas in our blog archives. You can use the category and tag labels to find other recipes that might be of interest or use our internal search tools to find something specific. Remember, treats (bought or homemade) are for spoiling your pup in moderation. We share ideas from treats that we’ve made ourselves for our pets, but different animals have different preferences (likes/dislikes), just like people. Some pets may have special dietary requirements and/or food allergies/intolerances. If you are ever in doubt or have questions about what’s suitable for your pet, have a chat with your trusted vet.
