The sisters and our mom at Pet Expo last year

Pups- It’s our favorite time of the year! Pet Expo!!  For those of you new pawrents, new to Hawai’i or even a pet lover just visiting, Pet Expo is a funfilled weekend where everyone Pet related in Hawaii gets together at the Neal Blaisdell Center for an event packed with games, giveaways, booths to shop at, and lots and lots and lots of Pets!

Here at Hawai’i Doggie Bakery, Pet Expo is one big PAWTY! We stay up all night with our friends and family to bake our entire menu of fresh baked goods for your pups to enjoy at the event.

This year we will be at our usual Pet Expo spot and we will be sharing a booth with our friends from Lei Woof and Inu Inu Hawaii!  For the Lei Woof and Hawai’i Doggie Bakery fans we will have a special “Aloha bundle” which will include special aloha biscuits made by Hawai’i Doggie Bakery and a Lei by Lei Woof.  We’ll reveal more details about this Aloha Bundle in a later blog.

We are also very exciting to be paw-ticipating in something really fun…a Treasure Hunt Game!  We belong to a small group of dog business owners called Pacific Pooch Hui.  We get together every once in awhile to discuss business, share good news and especially encourage and energize each other.  Some of the Pacific Pooch Hui members that will be at the Pet Expo and playing the game are Lei Woof, Dogwalker Etc, Healthy Doggies Hawaii, K9 & Kitty Kau Kau & Massage and Hawai’i Doggie Bakery.  After visiting each booth on the treasure map, you will be entered to win a prize pack from all the vendors.  You don’t want to miss this!!

The Hawai`i Doggie Bakery menu for Pet Expo will be:

	Doggie Muffins: Apple-n-Poi, Okinawan Sweet Potato and Banana
	Doggie Bentos
	Fish-n-Poi Pup Treats
	Kalua Chicken-n-Poi Munchies
	Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts
	Huli Chicken Roll Over Rolls
	Paw Lickin’ Lasagna
	Poi Dog Pretzels
	Giant Sweet Potato Pup Cake
	Biscuit Mixes
	Paws of Hawaii Cookbook
	Woofles

Also back in stock: Filthy Farmgirl 100% Natural Doggie Soaps!

We will have the following Dog Breed labels available at Pet Expo:Shiba Inu, Golden Retreiver, Pit Bull, Shih Tzu, Golden Lab, Chihuahua, German Shepard,Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Bulldog, Boxer, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, English Bulldog, Dachshund, Black Lab, Pappion, Jack Russell, Yellow Lab, Pug, Siberian Husky, Italian Greyhound, French Bulldog, Basenji, Pomeranian, Collie, Maltese, Sheltie

 Pet Expo will be on Saturday May 11th from 10 am – 4 pm and Sunday May 12th from 10 am- 4 pm! See you there!
**pls note, due to Islandwide Craft Fair & Pet Expo, we will not be at our regular Farmers’ Markets from May 2 – 11.**

Chris and our Pet Expo Noms

Place your pre-orders for Pet Expo by visiting our shop here.

Our booth at the Christmas Island Wide Expo!

The 17th Islandwide Spring will be held at the Neal Blaisdell Exhibition Hall on May 3rd from 4 pm – 8 pm. May 4th from 10 am – 8pm and May 5th from 10 am- 5 pm.  Mother’s day is the following week so this will be the perfect opportunity to find your mother something special!  Last winter we sold out of everything so make sure you come early!

Our Islandwide Spring Craft & Food Menu:

Fish-n-Poi Pup Treats

Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts

Kalua Chicken-n-Poi Munchies

Kawelo’s Kalo Bread

Apple-n-Poi Muffins

Poi Dog Pretzels

Huli Chicken Rollover Rolls

Malu’s Mini Manapuas

Doggie Lei

We always love special requests, so imagine our excitement when Tammy Kubo from Hawaii Pet Nanny asked us to put together favors for her son and his fiance’s Wedding Shower!  We had just finished creating our Adora-Beaus, AND Bow Wow Vows, the Wedding Roo & Boo Boo was about to take place, so we felt like we were really in the spirit of creativity and love!

After thinking long and hard and of course going on Pinterest a whole lot (we’re addicted!  we no longer Google for inspiration, we Pinterest!), we came up with some pawesome favors!

We started off with a special Gable Box, tied with ribbon in champagne and teal, the Wedding Colors.  We also created some custom labels featuring an ADORABLE photo of the Bride and Groom kissing their beloved dog, Tofu.  By request of Tammy, the labels read, “It’s about ‘Dog-gone’ Time the two of you got married!”  BOL!

Inside the box there were 4oz of Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts (to represent love), Bow Wow Bow Ties (for the Groom) and Fish-n-Poi Fortune Cookie Biscuits!  The box was topped off with a tulle ribbon.  So Wedding-y!

For the Bride and Groom’s Gift, we made a basket that included a doggie bow, fortune cookie biscuits, muffins, biscuits and more!!

This was so much fun, and we love being creative…especially in the name of “wuv!”  If you would like Doggie Biscuit Favors for your Wedding Shower, feel free to contact us!  We’d love to “woof”–we mean, chat with you! 

We’ve had to cut back a lot on paw-ticipating in all the Shiba fun over at Shiba Inu Hawaii, and this April is their 3rd Anniversary Celebration.  So to say “Paw-halo” to all Shibas everywhere, we wanted to create a very special treat and promotion for the entire month of April.

Starting April 1st, we will have for sale Shiba Inu shaped fresh baked biscuits!  These biscuits are available in our famous Chicken-n-Poi flavor as well as Okinawan Sweet Potato.  Not only will these special biscuits be joining our shop for April, but they are also a fundraiser as well!  $1 of every bag sold will go to Shiba Inu Hawaii to help fund their 3rd Anniversary Paw-ty.  Another $1 of each bag will go towards Shiba Inu Hawaii to use for charitable purposes.  It will be up to the club members to decide how they want to use it — donate to a Shiba in need, add to our PetWalk fundraising Team or a club donation to the 2nd annual Shiba Prom!  It’s up to the Sheebs!

Buy them today by clicking here!

These Shiba biscuits will be available for all of April, ending on April 30.  Sorry, discounts do not apply for this fundraiser.

Try your luck with our Paw-t of Gold!  At each of our farmers market this week (March 12th – March 16th), we will have twelve lucky kettles, containing a different surprise. Each of our kettles will contain different prizes ranging from discounts on your purchase, to free treats, even a coupon for a free Pawty cake!

Feeling Lucky?

Every customer gets one chance to pick their Paw-t of Gold.  Sorry mainland pups, our game is only available at our  local Farmers Markets only. We are also happy to announce that we will be starting the Neal Blaisdel Farmers Market on Wednesdays from 4 pm – 7pm! Sorry, this market is not dog friendly.

In addition to our Paw-t of Gold game, we will be selling Chicken & Poi Shamrocks and Saint Patricks Day Banana Muffins! Good luck pups and don’t forget to wear your grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreen!

Saint Patricks Day Muffins with honey shamrock toppers!

Shamrock Kalua Chicken & Poi Munchies

This Doggie Wedding Cake was certainly our biggest challenge yet.  We had never made a Doggie Wedding Cake…we certainly have never made a human Wedding Cake…but we were SO excited to take it on!  In the weeks prior to the Wedding, we did a lot of research on cakes.  We knew we wanted to make it a 3 tier cake, but weren’t sure how to stack the cake.  YouTube to the rescue!  Just search “how to make a layered Wedding Cake,” and you can find tons of tutorials on Wedding Cakes.  Did you know that you have to put a piece of cardboard between each layer, and then a dowel or straw so that it won’t sink?  We sure didn’t!  Thanks YouTube!!

Layers of Doggie Wedding Cake, carefully cut cardboard and straws all ready to go!

Our next challenge with this cake was the decorating.  There are sooo many styles of Wedding Cakes out there.  We can see how Brides can get overwhelmed with choices!  Lucky for us, we were limited to simple designs that we knew we could produce.  :-)  Not going to lie, we did get tempted to make an ombre cake, since the colors of the Wedding were blue and pink.  However, we decided that since a Wedding Cake for dogs is already pretty un-traditional, we should stick with just white on white.

We looked at Pinterest a lot (we LOVE Pinterest!!) and of course…YouTube!  Thanks to YouTube, we figured out how to make these lovely flowers/roses.

Practicing Doggie Wedding Cake Designs!

Then finally the day had arrived — Wedding Day!  The night before, we baked our layers of cake:  Okinawan Sweet Potato for the bottom layer and Banana for the middle and top.  We stacked them up on each other to make sure they would look ok, then went to sleep early…3:00AM wake up call in order to frost the cake and get to the Wedding Site by 7:30am!

Bottom layer: 2 paw-ty cakes…middle layer: 1 or 2? Decisions decisions!

That morning, all the research and planning began to come together.  We set the layers of cake with cardboard in between them….we pushed in the straws to hold the cake up…each layer was carefully frosted with cream cheese and smoothed out to make a nice clean surface…

The Doggie Wedding Cake starts to come together!

Then the real fun began: icing the cake!  We knew that each design needed to have some kind of dog-related feel to it, but we didn’t want it to have TOO much dog stuff.  The goal was to make it look classy, like it could actually be a Wedding cake, but with paw prints, bones, etc to give it that dog-theme.

To be honest, we actually didn’t 100% know how each layer was going to look.  We practiced designs, but not actually where they would go on the cake.  But everything just seemed to flow that morning, and we are very happy with the designs that we chose!  Here’s the cake before we got it into the car to bring over to site:

 The cake was finished just in the nick of time (7am!), and we headed over to the Wedding Location.  The Wedding was being held about 10 minutes away from our bakery.  It wasn’t a far drive, but when you’re transporting your first EVER multi-tiered cake, lemme tell you this is the longest ride of your LIFE.  Turns out…the cake was pretty darn solid.  But that didn’t stop us from driving slowly and peeking in at it every 2 minutes!

When we got onsite, the cake was put into a cold box until the reception.  After the Ceremony, we took the cake out to finish it.  The toppers of the cake were 2 oversized Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts, on which we wrote the Bride and Groom’s names.  We finished the cake decor with 2 roses, and it was ready for noms!

Behind the scenes confession: this was actually a good 3 minutes of Niki holding the flower and moving a few centimeters back and forth while we tried to figure out exactly where to place it!

We did it! So relieved!

The humans oooed and aaahhed over the cake.  The dogs nommed it up!  All in all a great success, and we just know the cake will bring much good luck to the Bride & Groom!

Above: The Bride and Groom get the first taste!
Below: Guests are so excited to get a lick!

Serving up Doggie Wedding Cake!

This was definitely a highlight in our Hawai`i Doggie Bakery careers!  We can’t wait until it airs on OC16 and we can share the entire Wedding with all of you.  Much thanks to Krystal from Lei Woof for referring us.  Great job to Eileen from Weddings by Kalehua for coordinating EVERYTHING, she did such a great job.  We can’t wait for another doggie Wedding!  Who’s next?  :-)

To pre-order your Girl’s Day set, click here.

Here’s where to find us this week:

Tues, Feb 26, 4pm-7pm  Ala Moana Farmers’ Market
Thurs, Feb 29, 4:30pm – 7:30pm   Makiki Farmers’ Market
Sat, March 2, 8am-12pm  Ala Moana Farmers’ Market
Sat, March 2, 9am-1pm  Hawaii Kai Farmers’ Market

To pre-order your Girl’s Day set, click here!

Since Beau’s name is pronounced like “Bow,” as in “Bow-tie,” his owners asked if we could make Fish-n-Poi flavored Bow Tie Biscuits!  At first we thought, sure, no problem!  We’ll just go look for a bowtie shaped cookie cutter.  But then we thought about it some more and we said no…we’re Hawai`i Doggie Bakery…we can do better!  And with the help of Pinterest (we’re obsessed!), we came up with a 3D bowtie biscuit just for Beau!  And because we love his cute little face so much, we secretly grabbed a photo of him to create light blue colored custom labels for the packaging, and finished it all off with a paw print ribbon.

Beau had his birthday paw-ty  at Aloha Dog Daycare, and this generous dog gave out “Adora-Beau’s” to all of his doggie friends.  You can check out more photos of Beau and his paw-ty on his Instagram.  His name is beau_theshihtzu and he has over 1,300 followers!

Thanks to Beau’s humans for the special request, it was soo much fun we had trouble sitting on the idea and not ruining the surprise.  If you have a special request for biscuits – or anything else dog treat related – you can contact us here.  And don’t forget to check out Lei Woof on their website and facebook!

My sister and I first met Rocky and his parents Dana and Todd very early in our start with Hawai’i Doggie Bakery in 2012.  Rocky was an older spaniel with the personality of a young vibrant puppy.  We quickly learned that Rocky was suffering from cancer and he was going through chemotherapy.  My family immediately bonded with Rocky because a couple months prior we discovered our oldest dog Xiao Gou also had cancer.  Together each week we shared stories, tips, laughter, and even tears.  Rocky met all of our dogs, and greeted them with tail wagging smiles. My favorite memory of him was seeing his face light up everytime we gave our yellow hdb bags.  Even if he was feeling sick, or shaky, as soon as he saw those bags he would perk up and stick his head in the bag with excitement!

Rocky waiting patiently for his treats…

What’s in the bag?

His favorite week was bento week, and his parents made sure never to miss it! I truely admire Dana and Todd’s commitment to making Rocky as happy and as comfortable as possible.  Even when one of them was sick, the other would make the weekly trip to our farmers market with Rocky.  One week we had to cancel a farmers market so Todd (who was training for the marathon) ran an insane amount of miles to our other location to pick up treats for Rocky! His parents went swimming at the Sand bar with him, socialized with other dogs, brought him to almost all of our dog events, even had photoshoots with him! They were exactly the kind of dog owners that my sister and I could look up to and there was no doubt in our minds that Rocky loved them as much as they loved him.

Our treats are Rocky approved!

At the beginning of January we received an email that Rocky had passed.  After crying and hugging each other and our dogs, we realized that although we will miss him, it comforts us that we were able to contribute to happiness up until the very end.  We will not forget how a dog could capture our hearts simply by being himself.

Rocky celebrating and loving life

Coincidently this week is bento week and Rocky’s birthday week.  In memory of Rocky, Dana, Todd, my sister, and I have decided to to something special to celebrate.  Since manapuas was his favorite treat we will be handing out free mini manapuas (while supplies last) in honor of Rocky for the next couple of days.   In return we ask that you give your dogs an extra kiss and hug this week.  In addition to giving our free manapuas, we have decided to officially rename our Tail Waggin’ Wontons to Rocky’s Tail Waggin’ Wontons!  It’s a little gift we would like to share with Rocky and their parents for reminding us that life is short, so love your dog as much as you can!

Rocky modeling in front of our tent!

Get your free Mini Manapuas by visiting us today, February 14 at Makiki Farmers’ Market from 4:30pm-7:30pm and Saturday, Feb 16 at Ala Moana Farmers’ Market 8am-12pm and also Saturday, Feb 16 at Hawaii Kai Farmers’ Market 9am-1pm.

For more information on Rocky and on canine cancer click on the links below

On the menu:

Mini Heart Cakes
Growlin’ Doggie Gau
Woofles
Kalua Chicken-n-Poi Munchies
Fish-n-Poi Pup Treats
Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts
Biscuit Mixes
Hawaii Doggie Bakery Cookbooks
Muddy Puppy Doggie Soaps

We strongly encourage you to place your pre-orders as last year we ran out of almost everything!  You can place your orders by visiting our shop here.