Food Friday: Bacon Applesauce Peanut Butter Cake

I bake a birthday cake for Brisbane every year. It is always frosted with cream cheese, and usually made from whatever I have around the house. Last year was applesauce banana oatmeal hamburger cupcakes. This year I made a bacon applesauce peanut butter cake.

Cooking for dogs pretty awesome because it's basically impossible to mess up. Like my husbands co-workers, dogs are happy to eat whatever you make, no matter how it turns out. Soggy? Cool. Crumbly? No problem! Greasy? Awesome! Tasteless? Tasty!

I often make cupcakes for Brisbane's birthday because I can just slap a pile of cream cheese on top no matter how they come out. Add sprinkles and they look deceptively like regular old cupcakes.

Following my foolproof method for making dog cake (something tasty, something wet, something dry) I started by browning several strips of bacon. I like maple-flavored chewy bacon, Brisbane is significantly less picky and likes all forms of bacon and bacon-like foods.

Next, I added a few spoonfuls of applesauce and peanut butter and whizzed it in the food processor with the bacon. I used rice flour for this cake, adding a little at a time until I got the consistency of cake batter. Had I wanted to make a grain-free cake, I could have used potato flour, garbanzo bean flour, almond flour, etc.

My goal for this cake was to end up with something I could frost and decorate like a tiny sheet cake. I baked this one in a loaf pan, so it came out long and skinny. Once it had cooled enough, I dumped it onto a cutting board and sliced it into a more pleasing rectangle.

Cream cheese spread makes a great non-sugary frosting for dog cakes. Some years I add food coloring, this year I left it white to keep up the sheet cake appearance. It spreads best when the tub has been left out of the fridge for a couple of hours to warm up.

The decorative touches on this cake are made from store-bought decorator frosting. I might be able to pipe cream cheese like decorator frosting, but it's tough to get the right consistency and this year I was feeling sort of lazy.

I think this year's dog cake came out rather well. It still looked like a miniature sheet cake when sliced. It did have five or six strips of bacon in it, but nobody here has had any tummy trouble after eating it. If my dogs had any history of sensitive stomachs or pancreatitis I probably wouldn't be feeding them bacon and cake frosting. This is a once-a-year treat.