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Want to include your dogs in the holiday decorating fun? Why not try your hand at making your dog her very own gingerbread house to enjoy.
Decorate with dog treats, bacon, or whatever your dog likes best. We used fancy sprinkles for decorative houses and served plain ones to our four-legged friends at the office. What a hit!
The cookies and frosting are easy breezy to throw together, but getting perfect cutout shapes and assembly can be a little trickier! Paper patterns like this one we used from Delicious Magazine are plentiful online, with many shapes and styles to choose from. But be warned, in our experience, the bigger the house, the harder it is to get it to stick together. So for the majority of our cookies, we opted to use this handy little cookie cutter set from Amazon, thus assuring perfectly shaped components!
Gingerbread Doghouse Recipe
We tried a few different flour blends to discover that whole wheat flour paired with oat flour (our favorite choice for dog treats) created a cookie dough that was easy to cut out, dried firm and sturdy, and didn’t spread much during baking.
Straight oat flour dough will work, but the dough will not hold together so well. Equal parts oat flour and all purpose flour works well but the dough stretches more, and spreads more during the baking process.
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 25 minutes
- Total Time: 40 minutes
- Yield: 1 Tray of cookies 1x
Scale
Ingredients
- 2 cups oat flour
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 Tbsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- pinch of ground clove
- pinch of allspice
- pinch of mace
- 1/4 cup molasses
- 3/4 cup applesauce
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 Tbsp coconut oil
For the frosting
- 1 block neufchatel low-fat cream cheese
- 1 Tbsp vanilla
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine dry ingredients and stir well.
Make a well in the center of wet ingredients and add in the wet ingredients.
Stir to combine, adding more flour as needed to achieve a good dough to roll out.
Separate half the dough to work with, covering the remaining dough so that it doesn’t dry out.
Roll dough to a quarter inch thickness on a floured board.
Cut out house pieces, taking care as you lay them on your cookie sheet to straighten any wonky edges or lines.
Bake 20-25 minutes or until golden on the bottom.
You can turn off the oven and allow the cookies to cool in the oven if you want an extra dry cookie.
For the frosting
Beat cream cheese and vanilla in mixer until fluffy. You can add a little powdered gelatin, cornstarch, or tapioca flour to maintain consistency.
Apply a thin coat of frosting to cooled house parts and press together carefully. It will take at minimum 24 hours for a firm set.
Top tip: Making these cute cookies for immediate consumption? You can use peanut butter for the “glue” as well. The oil of the nut butter will eventually soak into your cookie house so this is best for same day consumption.