This Cake Has Gone to the Dogs...Literally

As you might have read in my early posts, we own a very sweet greyhound named Lina. We adopted her from Austin Greyhound Adoption (AGA), an organization that rescues retired racing greyhounds and tries to place them in a well-matched forever home. If you're looking for a sweet, smart, quiet and low-energy dog, then I highly recommend adopting a greyhound.

Recently, Austin Greyhound Adoption celebrated their fourth year of helping the hounds, so they decided to throw a birthday bash at Austin's Zoom Room (an indoor dog playground/training facility). My husband Ryan and I enjoy donating our time and talents to AGA, so he volunteered to shoot photos (these are his photos) and I offered to bake treat biscuits (greyhound- and bone-shaped sugar cookies) and a birthday cake for the greyhounds to enjoy.

Happy 4th Birthday AGA!

Lina enjoys some cake, well, the peanut butter part at least.

For the dog cake, I wanted to use healthy human ingredients but designed with dog dietary needs in mind, and also, no meat so that it doesn't need constant refrigeration. I found a recipe for a dog carrot cake which uses a few simple and inexpensive ingredients. The  cake itself consists of nothing more than carrots, eggs, unsweetened applesauce, oats and flour. The cake filling is just peanut butter and the outside of the cake is iced with plain instant mashed potatoes. It was pretty simple to make and it's even people friendly, although you wouldn't want to eat it because it tastes like dry and bland carrot bread (yes, I tried a bite of the dog cake for quality control).

A greyhound pup gobbles down his slice of cake

The cake was a hit with most of hounds, but we discovered that Lina doesn't like carrots and would only lick the peanut butter filling out of her piece of cake. That was shocking since Lina will eat anything and everything. Also, I think I created some confusion with my choice of baked goods because I had several people requesting a piece of cake for themselves and wanting a cookie for their dog.

All in all, the party was a blast and AGA raised some money through the silent auction as well as donations, all of which goes to helping the hounds. May they have many more birthdays and rescued greyhounds in their future.

If you would like to donate to AGA or if you're interested in greyhound adoption, visit http://www.austingreyhounds.org.

This greyhound is a true party animal. Roooooo!