Pupcakes Recipe

So for Pax's birthday, I decided to go all out #MomOfTheYear and make pupcakes for his birthday.  Let me explain what happened though... I couldn't find a recipe that used the ingredients I wanted to use, sooo I kinda made it up as I went along and hoped for the best.  This method actually worked for once and it didn't backfire as I kind of expected it to.  What had happened was, I found a recipe to make a cake from scratch, then looked up substitutions for items I could replace in the cake recipe with the items I wanted to use (i.e. instead of eggs, I used banana).

PS.  None of the ingredients are really exact measurements except for the dry items since I was just making it up as I went along.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

• 4 bananas - 2/3 for the recipe, 1/2 for you and the dogs as a snack.
• 2 cups of flour - I had coconut flour that was probably well past expired, so I used that, but it would have been all-purpose flour otherwise since that's always in the cabinet.
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 can of pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie mix, these things are NOT the same)
• 1/2+ cup of oil
• Maybe some water, maybe.

For the icing:

• Greek yogurt (plain is preferred but the store didn't have that, so I used honey flavored).
• Peanut butter

Directions:

1. Mix cake dry goods in a bowl.
2. Mix cake wet goods in a different bowl.
3. Combine cake goods into a bowl and ensure everything is mixed well.
4. Spray muffin tin or pan or whatever container you are cooking these things in with cooking spray.
5. Fill muffin tin with mixture.  
6. Cook until the middles aren't gooey.  I baked mine for at least 35-45 minutes.
7. Let the cakes cool.
8. Mix yogurt and peanut butter.  Use your judgement for amounts.
9. Grab dog bowl.  Place a cake in the bowl (maybe breaking it up if your dog is a slob), spoon some of the "icing" on top of the cake.  
10. Serve to beast or human.

Final product:

They aren't really much to look at.
Like all delicious noms.

See, I told you, nothing was actually very specific.

But I will explain what I did and how it turned out, but I wanted to get through the recipe so 1- people looking for the recipe didn't have to scroll through 6 million pages of my life story, 2- The references I make will make more sense now.

I had all the ingredients on hand except for the yogurt, which is why I was willing to make these pupcakes.  I had pumpkin on hand from the pumpkin pies I never made at Christmas or Thanksgiving, IDK which.  My baking powder expired in 2016.  Sooo ya know, should probably replace that.  No idea how long that baking soda has been open, BUT it is in a sealed plastic bag, so I figured it was fine.  /shrug.  I mean, while humans COULD eat these muffins, I didn't want to add any sugar or salt or spices in general since I wasn't making them for humans..

So when I got to step 3 where I combined the dry and wet items, my mixture was SUPAAAA clumpy and would not stick together at all.  Like, to the point that I was afraid that if I just smooshed the mix into the muffin tin, the cakes would just be crumbles after they were cooked and I tried to remove them from the tin.  

So I added an egg.  And still, I wasn't comfortable with the mixture.  

Soooo, I added some canola oil.  Still no good.  

I added another egg.  I was questionable on it, but I had nothing to lose, so it was fine.  

Still wasn't confident the batter would make cakes, so I added some water until the clumps were starting to stick together.  

Looking back, I know that I didn't need the eggs.  The batter would have held together with just the oil.  You probably also don't really need the water, but I put it on the ingredients list to make your brain comfortable.  The thing with making the batter more moist is that the cook time will take longer.  That's science, but I can explain it to you if you're curious. 

I mushed the batter into the cups with my super sterile and clean fingers, filling the cups completely since I didn't anticipate the cakes rising (spoiler alert: I was right).  I used a regular muffin tin because the mini muffin tin I found in my kitchen probably would have given the dogs Tetanus it was so rusty. A replacement silicone tray has been ordered.

I set a timer for 20 minutes and that was definitely not enough time with all the wet ingredients I used.  I guess you could also add more flour/dry ingredients if you made the batter too wet, but I only had 2 muffin tins and I didn't want to have 10 years worth of extras, so I was trying not to make too much batter.  So I cooked the cakes for 20 minutes more.  At 40 minutes, some of them were done, but not the super thick ones.  I had added the 2nd tin to the oven since I realized they were going to have to cook for a long time and my time was running short.

And then, when it was time for me to leave, I did what all great experimental cooks do... I removed the mostly cooked tin from the oven and put it in the microwave so the dogs wouldn't help themselves (because they would) and turned off the oven and left the other tin in the oven to keep cooking, hopefully.

I came back to the house about 40 minutes later to grab something and checked on the muffins and the tin I had left in the oven was done!  I swapped it out with the tin in the microwave and left those in the oven (still turned off but warm) when I left the house.  For some reason, I had to come BACK to the house another 40ish minutes later and when I checked on the oven tin, the undercooked muffins were done!  Megan Miracles!  

Because we live the big dog life, the microwave is a sealed storage area for food that we don't want the dogs getting to but also don't want to put in the fridge, so I put both pans in the microwave and headed back out.  I didn't mess with the cakes until the following day and leaving them in the microwave meant that they didn't dry out, which was perfect.  I mixed enough yogurt with enough peanut butter to make the icing.  I did let husband eat some of the greek yogurt since it's not something I usually keep in the house (since I don't eat it), but other than what he ate, the entire large container went to the icing.  I probably used 1.5 cups of peanut butter, if not more and just mixed it together with a spoon.

I ended up with a total of 16 pupcakes.

The dogs performed quality control the day I made the icing.  I distributed 6 pupcakes to the GLCK pups.  This left us with 6 pupcakes, 3 for Pax's birthday and 3 for Pax's gotcha day.

Quality Control (not pictured: Roux, Marcy, and Max):

Gracie!

Basha and Winston!

Quality Testing

I believe that of 9 test subjects, I got a total of 36 paws up.