Blogger Tuesday

Weeeeeeeee.....I'm still flying a little bit high over our blog getting picked to be the winner!! Thank you again to everyone who voted for us and for all the nice stuff you guys have been saying! It really does mean a lot.:o)


Before I get into my blog pick for the week, I have sort of exciting news. Since Bess is in season right now, I decided to take Heffner to agility class tonight! We lowered his jump height and I didn't run him through any tunnels. And he did fantastic! He was soooooo happy to be out there running! I wasn't sure how he'd be with the weave poles, but we just went for it. I am not kidding when I say that I have NEVER seen him run weaves better than he did tonight! And a full set of 12 to boot! He had great drive through the entire set, he was fast, he was accurate, he had great entrances, and I was able to keep a distance from him. It was just amazing! Our instructor was incredibly impressed with him tonight. He also ran the courses like a dream! He was just soooo happy and nailing everything that I put in front of him. I'm so excited to have him back in the game!


Now on to my pick for Blog of the Week! I have chosen The Greyhound Beckett & His Dog Treats! It's a great blog to read. Enjoyable posts, and Beckett's mom bakes him some WONDERFUL dog treats! That's really what caught my attention. She uses some really great ingredients. I was so inspired while reading their blog that I decided that I needed to get off my duff and bake the dogs some treats! I haven't done that in ages and it was also one of my monthly goals for this blog that I've slipped a bit on. The specific recipe that I went for was the Blueberry Chamomile Cookies. I will start off by warning you that I'm not a huge fan of going through the trouble of putting together our mixer, using it, and then cleaning it. So I usually just mix things by hand (I wasn't sure if the original recipe was done with a mixer or not). It doesn't always work, and sometimes it only sort of works. Either way, I get my own unique spin on things. When I mixed all of the ingredients except for the potato flour together (I tripled the recipe), this was my result:
Not nearly as pretty as Beckett's mom's version, but I'll take it. And my guys are such food hounds that I really don't think they care a whole lot. Next I added in the potato flour.
And yes, the dough totally takes on this weird/neat sponge-like quality to it. It was kind of fun to play with!
And here it is without the flash. It kind of gives it a different look and I think you kind of get a better feel for the sponginess.
I didn't really feel like going through the effort of rolling out the dough and using the cookie cutters that we have (are you seeing a general trend in the laziness department? ;o) ), so I made little patties and put them on the baking sheets.
And here's what they look like all nice in the over before baking (we have two ovens and the overflow cookies went in there).
I put both of the ovens on their lowest temperature settings, which I believe put them at right around 150-160 F. Now when Beckett's mom says that it takes several hours for these to bake, she's seriously serious! I thought that it would be fun to document the first few hours of the cookies baking. You don't see a whole lot of change, but here goes. Here's after the first hour.
And after the second.
Each time I opened the ovens, I got the most wonderful chamomile smell that wafted out at me. It was so yummy and comforting smelling! And here's after three hours.
After hour three, it was getting time for me to turn in for the night since I had started these cookies after getting home from work on one of the days last week. I decided to just chance it and leave the cookies baking over night and then I'd check on them first thing in the morning. When I got up, they were all still pretty moist and doughy in the middle. Definitely not to the crispy stage yet. Finally I had to go to work and I couldn't just leave the cookies baking all during the day. So I pulled them out after 13 hours in the oven and this is what they looked like.

I put the cookies in a Zip lock bag and into the freezer where I'm going to keep them as I use them. So yes, a lot of time in the over, but the cookies smell really good and the dogs definitely like them!