Peanut Butter Chocolate Dog Birthday Cake

For Diego's birthday this year I decided to make him a birthday cake, to not only enjoy himself but share with some of his doggy mates. Years and years ago I had made Daisy a birthday cake out of liver and I remember what a mess that cake was. The dogs liked it, but it left the house reeking of cooked liver, and the blender took a couple of washes to get the scent out of it. After remembering that, I made sure that this years cake didn't involve any smelly meat elements.

I googled for a recipe and found this fantastic recipe from Baked by Joanna for a Banana Carob Oat Cake. I decided to give this recipe a go, and in typical Morgan style, completely butchered Joanna's recipe by not following it 100%. Some things just never change.

I had one overly ripe, probably quite bruised banana at my house, and that is what originally attracted me to this recipe. The problem was I only had one of these bananas, and I wasn't going to put one of my perfectly ripe bananas in the cake. So only one banana was used. First potential mistake.

Second, I didn't buy Carob because that is super expensive, and I didn't have time to hunt it down. Whanganui isn't generally known for its exotic range of foods, so it is easily possible that it might not even be available here. Instead, I used dog chocolate treats. I don't see the problem with substituting the carob for these treats as it has the same effect, just potentially a bit more bad ingredients go into the dog chocolate treats.

I also used wholegrain oats instead of rolled. I am not sure if this changed anything but thought it was worth noting.

The last change I made was with the icing. I made my own concoction for the icing, a mix of yoghurt, peanut butter and coconut oil. This meant that the icing went a bit hard, perfect for transporting treats to Wellington with us, as well as making sure that not too much mess was made. For the writing, I used the same mixture, but changed the quantities so that there was more coconut oil. This made the writing a lot easier, although I did have chunks of something that kept clogging the piping bag, resulting in some strange places. I added a bit of food colouring to make it green. I think this was a positive change. Could still be wrong though.

So the end result was definitely enjoyed by all dogs that trialled it, however it was super tough. The cake itself was very dense, and required a lot of chewing and breaking by the dogs to actually eat it. Maybe if rolled oats and two bananas were used this might not have happened. Otherwise my mother suggested more baking powder could have been used to make it rise more. Diesel (My aunties dog) ate two pieces in the time it took Jagger (Diego's brother that my aunty owns) to even start his. The icing went down a treat though, and if any somehow got on the ground the dogs were happy to lick it all clean.

I would love to hear how this recipe turned out if you have tried it, or what cake recipe you think I should try next. Leave us a comment down below :)