Store Bought Teething Biscuits vs. Homemade Teething Biscuits

Updated 6/16/16: I know I just posted this about a week ago, but I wasn't really satsified with how it turned out. So I decided to redo it and try to make it how I wanted it to be in the first place.

For my very first edition of Try Me Tuesday (even though this is late on a Thursday), I thought I would stick close to home and try to replicate teething biscuits. Lion is in the fun stage of learning how to feed himself and getting teeth. I find teething biscuits are great for both. And Blue for some reason really enjoys eating them too.

Normally I buy my boys Baby Mum-Mum Teething Biscuits. They're really great. They're free of most allergen producing foods, dye free and I believe they are all non-gmo. (You can also find them in organic as well). They come two to a package. So it makes it easy to share between my two boys (or enough for a snack for Blue). I really have no complaints about them.

However I was intrigued by the idea of making my own for my boys. I checked the ingriedients and it was nothing I couldn't handle. I just needed to find the proper way to put everything together and bake it. So I turned to handy dandy Pinterest to find something. And while I couldn't find a recipe to replicate the teething biscuits exactly I did find a couple of recipes that I think work similar. In the end I decided to go with the recipe found on Boys Ahoy. 

The Experiement

Part 1: Is the Recipe Doable?

I am not an experienced baker by no means. But I can follow a recipe, especially one as easy as this one. So I felt like this was something that at any experience level it would be doable. 

And it really truly is. The recipe calls for simple ingredients you should have in your pantry (or that are easy enough to find in the store if you don't). Once you get all the ingredients into the bowl it  mixes easily into a dough. You probably will have to add more water to get all the flour in, but the recipe does leave room for that.

It was fairly easy to roll out using a rolling pin. It didn't really stick to the pin too much. And even when it did, a little extra flour easily solved the problem.

And the dough seemed to make a decent amount of biscuits.

As you can see I was able to get 8-12 biscuits with my giant Christmas themed cookie cutters (with smaller sized cookie cutters you should be able to get more). And the best part is that they don't grow in size they bake, so you can jam as many onto a cookie sheet as you can.

The only problem I had with this is that sometimes I rolled out my dough a little too thin and by the 15 minute mark in the oven they were starting to get a little burnt.

So yes it is something anybody could handle making for their kids.

2. Can You Change the Flavor?

My favorite part of the Baby Mum-Mum Teething Biscuits is that they come in a variety of flavors. That way you can switch it up every time you buy a box or you can keep buying the same kind. I wanted to see if I could do the same with the homemade recipe.

Once I knew I could handle making biscuits I set out to make different  

The first batch I made plain subbing out the banana for more water and oil. (I'm not sure the ratio I used I just kept adding a little of both until I was able to form a dough). 

The second batch I kept the banana in. And I learned the more overripe your banana is the more banana flavor your teething biscuits
For the third bath I subbed out the banana for an avocado. 

And what I learned from all of this is that you can slightly alter the flavor of the product. The plain ones taste  like whole wheat biscuits, the banana ones taste like banana and whole wheat and the avocado ones taste most like whole wheat with a hint of avocado.

So you can slightly change the flavor to the biscuits. I think to make the biggest flavor change you would need to sub out the some water used with some juice. And probably use a flour that doesn't have such a dominant flavor.

Conclusion

Is It Really Worth It?

When I first started writing this I was going to say that unless you need to get rid of some excess baby cereal, then it wasn't really worth it to make your own. But you know what some how writing this made me have a change of heart. And I think that's because I put a lot of work into them. 

And, as you can see above, my boys both seem to really enjoy the homemade teething biscuits as much as they enjoy equally if not more than the store bought teething biscuits. And that just warms my heart as a mother.

So yes its totally worth it to make them for your children. The recipe is simple enough to follow and simple enough to modify to find your needs.But if you don't have time to bake or just simple can't bake (there's no shame in that, Mike's a terrible baker. He somehow burns ready to bake cookies.), then the store bought teething biscuits are just as great.