This post started with us wondering what to do with the massive amount of Starbucks Frappuccino bottles we have collected. They are very nice bottles, so we don’t really want to throw them out, but they’ve been sitting on our shelves for awhile and we feel guilty whenever we get a new one.

So, we decided to combine two projects we’ve been thinking about — decorating the bottles and making doggie treats.

First, we’ll show you the end result.

Homemade doggie treats ready to give as a gift! (And in a recycled bottle.)

We also want to create labels for the bottles that we’re going to print out with the words “Dog Treats” and probably a cute little logo that we make up or some other artwork. We’ll place those over where we removed the Starbucks label because, no matter how well we washed the bottle, the glue where the old labels used to be is still really sticky.

You can use pretty much any kind of empty and clean food container that you have a lot of. (We also have empty Folger’s Instant Coffee bottles, for example, for holding larger treats.)

Next, we’ll tell you how we did it:

Like we mentioned, we peeled the labels from the bottle.

We then washed the bottle well and let it dry well.

We used some ribbon that we had to wrap around the neck of the bottle and some more to make a bow.

For the future, we’d like to get some round stickers that we can simply put over the Starbucks logo on the top of the bottle lid, but, for this one, we cut out a round piece of shiny green wrapping paper and glued that on. We used a glue gun to glue the thinner (dotted) ribbon around the edges of the lid of the bottle.

After that, we made the dog treats.

The recipe:

1 can of pureed pumpkin

1 jar of peanut butter (we used chunky for some extra crunch)

Flour

2 eggs

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Mix 3/4 can of the pumpkin (if you have chickens, you can give the leftover contents of the can to them; they will love it!) with two eggs, 3/4 cup peanut butter, 3 1/2 cups flour in a medium bowl.

You can use a blender, but we were able to easily mix the ingredients by hand.

Spoon the mixture onto baking sheet in rounded balls approximately 3/4 of an inch apart. Cook for approximately 20 minutes, depending on how large the treats are. We made snack-sized treats so they would fit in the bottle.

Note: If you want to use a cookie cutter to cut the mixture into shapes, you will likely need to add more flour and also let the dough chill in the refrigerator for a few hours at least before cooking.

We cooked two batches of treats. The first batch was smaller and we let them cook hard all the way through, like a round biscuit.

For the second batch, we made the balls a little rounder and bigger and didn’t cook them as long, so that they stayed soft, like a cookie.

After letting both batches cool down, we let the dogs try them. All five dogs liked them a lot and seemed to really appreciate getting something that was freshly baked. In fact, within a very short period of time, almost both trays of the treats, except for a few we set aside, and the ones we put in the sample jar, had been consumed.

Here’s Terra, our older chihuahua, sampling one of the soft-baked treats:

Fortunately, the recipe yields a lot of treats if you make them in smaller balls or small-sized like we did. We made four tray-fulls all together.

The next day we made more treats and we did use one of the empty bottles from instant coffee to make a treat bottle to send to our sister, brother-in-law and nephew, who recently adopted a dog named Meadow from a shelter on Long Island.

Instant coffee bottle recycled as dog treat holder.

Soon after, Meadow got our treats in the mail and loved them! Plus she has a keepsake bottle for treats from now on. 🙂