Chasing around for rocks

My love of baking is not exclusive to baking for the human species.  In our house you can find three cookbooks of recipes for dogs and a random smattering of loose recipes floating about for our four-legged furkids.  Spoiling those brats is not a hobby around here, it is a full-time job that we take on with pride and gusto.

If you have not been blessed with a great big Bailey-yawn in the face, let me try to describe to you the stench that miniature dachshund emits from within her little muzzle.  It is as if our town decided to use her mouth as a landfill.  Or she became a garbage disposal.  Or a fish graveyard.  Or perhaps all of the above.  Bill, our "tweenie weenie,"  is not much better in the oral department.

Randomly flipping through one of the doggy-cookbooks a few days ago, I spotted a recipe for after-dinner mints for dogs.  PERFECT!  Overexcited?  Yes, as I usually get when it comes to anything canine.

*Note:  I will handle meat products to be fed to dogs (or cats or any other naturally meat eating animal.)  Reason?  Dogs are naturally carnivorous and need the meat and it's nutrients to live a healthy life.  We have bred dogs to also digest grains and vegetables, but nature created the dog as a primarily carnivorous animal.  Just look at the animal's jaw, for Dingo's sake!  On a happy note, I have not yet found a cookie recipe that requires meat products that I've wanted to bake...those usually look nasty anyhow.

Most of the ingredients for these mints were pretty easy to find: parsley, mint, gluten-and-wheat-free flour (which is a plus because Bill has corn and wheat allergies), olive oil, and water.  The one thing that had me all over and in a craze was the activated charcoal.

What??

Okay, so the cookbook said that any good health food store would have activated charcoal.  I first went to Whole Foods because, well, they have everything.  Their charcoal only came in capsules.  I bought them in case I could cut the capsules open and use what was inside.  My parents convinced me to look for powdered charcoal.  I returned the capsules and went to a health food store 5 minutes from my house.  Only capsules.  I bought them.  I checked www.gnc.com and www.walgreens.com and I'm pretty sure powered charcoal is either not buyable or VERY hard to find.

So, tonight I snipped open those capsules and got to it!  But I didn't realize there would be such a POOF with each snip.  Before I looked like Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, I settle on half the charcoal the recipe called for.  I knew as I mixed the dough that it wouldn't turn out right.  The picture in the book showed beautiful round cookie-mints of a golden yellow hue speckled green with parsley and mint.  My dough was gray and mucky from charcoal.  After baking the necessary 25 minutes, they were little rocks of gray muck.

I followed the directions minus half a tablespoon of charcoal.  I read the recipe several times over to figure out my mistake and it was too simple to have gone wrong anywhere.

So now sit 29 rocks on the stove which will be tossed tomorrow because I don't want to kill my spoiled beasties.  If I feel generous, I'll look in a different cookbook and whip up some other tasty treat.  Did I mention they're supposed to be on diets?