Stamping patterns into your homemade dog treats is an easy way to dress up special treats. It’s actually my favourite way to decorate dog treats! As promised in our post on how to make hard-set royal icing for dogs, here is an alternative way to make fancy Easter egg dog treats. You can also use these techniques to make human cookies, if you’d like. Pawfect!
Skipping the Icing in Favour of Stamps
No Extra Ingredients
Since you can use any roll-and-cut dough with no extra toppings, stamping is a great way to make a fancy treat for a dog with allergies or special dietary sensitivities using your favourite safe recipe.
Quick, Simple, and Fun
There’s no icing set or dry time involved with stamping. There’s also much less mess, which is great if the kids are helping out. And it’s fun!
Easier Storage and Handling
The finished treats look fancy, but are freezer-friendly, easily packaged as presents, and pocket portable for treats on the go.
Making Stamped Easter Egg Dog Treats
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 that can take an impression cleanly. Avoid using chunky ingredients that will be difficult to stamp. Dough colour variations and speckling may also be a distraction from the stamped pattern. See our post on decorating homemade dog treats for more information and helpful tips.
Stamping Tools
The impressions can be made using any clean and safe object that you’d like to try as a stamping tool. To make these Easter egg dog treats I used a chopstick (large impressions), toothpick (small solo indentations), knife (straight lines), mini heart plunger, all of which I had on hand in the kitchen. The awesomest of all were my fondant tools, which were a great way to quickly stamp a repeating pattern with lots of little dotty dents into the treats, but you can totally make fancy patterns without any special tools at all. I probably should have been a little slower and more careful patterning mine up to be truly fancy, but was having too much fun. And they are dog treats after all. My dogs definitely didn’t care about a few boo-boos in the patterns on their yummy treats. Hehehe…
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. For Easter egg dog treats, you’ll need a basic egg shaped cookie cutter. If you don’t have one, fortunately eggs aren’t too tricky. You can squeeze a cut cardboard tube into an egg shape and wrap it in foil as a temporary cutter or hand cut egg shapes with a template. Check out this post from the baking gurus at King Arthur to see how you can make your own substitute cookie cutting templates.
- 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.
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.
