How to make homemade fortune cookies for dogs. Ready to celebrate the new year, furfriends? Here are two easy ways to make dog-friendly fortune cookies, plus bonus DIY paw print red envelopes. This year’s upcoming Chinese New Year celebration may mark the Year of the Goat transitioning to the Year of the Monkey, but really every year around here is the Year of the Dog! Hehehe…
Sniffing for Facts and Fortunes
If (like me) you grew up in an area where fortune cookies were a staple at any Chinese restaurant, you might be surprised to learn that they aren’t traditional at all. They aren’t even Chinese. Check out this article from The New York Times to dog deeper into the origin of the fortune cookie. This article from the Library of Congress on fortune cookies is also a good read. They may not be truly traditional, but cookies are still rather doggone fun, so let’s look at two easy ways that you can make dog-friendly cookies for your celebrations.
Dogifying the Fortune Cookie
Fortune cookies typically include more sugar and fat than we like to have in our dog treats. So, we set out to create an alternative. Since sugar and fat are also the very ingredients that make fortune cookies crispy, we made a few compromises, but came up with two different homemade dog-friendly fortune cookie options. These homemade fortune cookie dog treats won’t be snappily crisp like a real fortune cookie, but they’re pretty darn cute and a whole lot healthier, too. My dog’s can’t be trusted with paper fortunes either, but we had lots of fun!
Sugar-Free Baked Crepe Dog Fortune Cookies (Small Batch)
Baked Biscuit Fortune Cookie Dog Treat Recipe with (Optional) Seasonings
These baked fortune cookie dog treats start with a thin batter that is first cooked like a crepe, and then folded into a fortune cookie shape before baking until firm. The batter is rather plain, so you can add your choice of dog-friendly seasonings to the mixture before cooking if you’d like to boost the scent and flavour. Depending on your pup and preferences, Ceylon cinnamon or ground ginger are cookie-scented options. For a more savoury fortune cookie dog treat, you can use dog-friendly dried herbs. You can also make things extra special by hiding something yummy inside instead of a fortune before folding the cookie.
Treat Ingredients:
- 1 egg white
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1/4 cup brown rice flour
- Unseasoned unsalted stock or other dog-friendly liquid to dilute to a thin crepe-like batter
Making the Treats:
- Preheat your oven to 200C (or local equivalent) and gather together your baking ingredients and materials. Note that for these treats, you need a frying pan and a muffin tin instead of a standard baking sheet.
- Heat a non-stick frying pan (or a standard frying pan with a light spritz of oil) over medium heat.
- Whisk the egg white in a bowl until frothy, mix in the oil, flour, and seasonings (optional). Then incrementally add stock/liquid to dilute into a thin spreadable crepe-like batter.
- Prepare the fortune cookies individually as follows:
- Spoon a small amount of batter into the pan and spread into a circle.
- Cook very briefly to lightly golden, lift with spatula, flip, and cook the other side to lightly golden.
- Remove to a plate, fold the warm mini-crepe in half (insert a fortune in the middle if you wish), push the folded edge over the rim of a glass to bend into a crescent shape, and place into a lightly greased muffin tin. Around 10cm diameter circle for your crepe works well for a standard muffin tin, or go tinier for a mini-muffin tin.
- Repeat for each fortune cookie treat.
If these were real fortune cookies, they would become hard and crisp as the fats and sugars set, but our dog-friendly fortune cookies need a little extra TLC. Not that the dogs would object either way. We’re going to bake the shaped cookies in the muffin tin to help firm them up.
Baking for Extra Crunch
- Pop your muffin tin of cookies into the oven and bake until golden. You can cool the cookies in the oven with the door ajar for a little more crunch in the crepe cookie (or dehydrate them after removing from the pan), but take care not to accidently burn them.
- All the cookie to cool with the support of the pan for shape if/as needed before removing.
- Cool further before serving and/or storage.
- Don’t forget to remove the fortune (if used) before feeding to your dog.
Simple Baked Chicken Dog Fortune Cookie Bites
Baked Sliced Meat Fortune Cookie Dog Treats
Don’t want to make crepes for a cookie-style biscuit? You can cheat and create a pseudo-cookie in minutes using a round slice of luncheon/sandwich meat. Get low-salt and unseasoned if possible. We used chicken for the pictured treats. The dogs were already excited just from the bag coming through the door into the house, let along the smell of it in the oven. Drool drool…
Making the Treats:
The luncheon meat takes the place of the prepared crepes in the instructions above. Fold, place in a lightly greased muffin tin, and bake until crispy on the edges (longer if you wish). Cool and indulge your waiting pup. These are not quite as pretty or cookie-like, but the dogs felt very fortunate indeed. Put to the test, I’m sure both our boys would recommend chicken over cookies. Haha!
Homemade Red Envelopes
If you prefer something a little more traditional that fortune cookies, I am sure that your dog would be happy with any dog-safe feasting shares or treats, or you can gift you pup a little red envelope of treat money. We made the envelopes used for styling the photos in this post after getting inspired by the red envelope DIY at One Dog Woof (not a dog blog, just a fortuitous coincidence). Since my dogs can’t be trusted with sweet delicious money, I gave them each an IOU instead. Shall we take then to the pet shop to pick out some toys and treats?
Making Our Red Envelopes
I used a little bit of scrap textured red cardstock to make my red envelopes. Following the example linked from One Dog Woof, I folded my paper envelopes into shape. I rounded all of the flap corners, used a textured punch on one to add a little flair on the back seam. To keep with our dog theme, on the other I added pawprint punch embellishment backed with a scrap of golden yellow paper. Pawfect!
Alternative Dog-Friendly Red Envelopes
If you don’t want to make your own envelopes, you can punch or stamp a ready-made red envelope with dog designs. Or just stick with the plain envelopes and a treat IOU. After all, the dogs don’t care about pretty packaging. Or IOUs for that matter. Haha! If you’re packing treats for gifting, a pillow-box style tube (wrapped in red, if you’d like) makes an easy recycled and recyclable envelope substitute. Or you could use a red bandana as fabric wrapping. Need tags? Our rainbow collection of free printable dog treat tags and labels includes red paw print tags.
Howlidays and Reader Requests
Looking for pet-friendly holiday and special occasion ideas? We take requests for future posts, and have created dog-friendly holiday DIYs, recipes, freebies, and more (including for holidays and occasions we don’t celebrate ourselves). We can’t turn every special request into a scheduled post due to planning and other constraints, but will try to help with ideas where we can!
