Sometimes, we want to treat our rabbits to more than just a quick snack. We want to give them something entertaining to do as well!
Giving your bunny a fun challenge or an interesting puzzle to solve is not only really good for their mental health, but it’s also going to be fun for you as well!
Ingredients
- About 10 Raisins
- Half a Banana
- A bit of hay
- 1/8 cup Pellets
- Cardboard Tubes from Toilet Paper Rolls
- Some carboard from an amazon box (or the such)[spacer height=”20px”]
Preparation
Prepare oven by setting to 200C
Step 1 – Pulverize the Pellets
Using a pestle and mortar (or a well-cleaned coffee grinder) that you’ve cleaned really well, grind the pellets into fine powder.
Step 2 – Mush the Banana
Using a spoon, or your fingers, or a fork, turn the bananas into mush.
Step 3 – Chop the Raisins
Using a knife, cut the raisins into quarter pieces. You don’t need to take each raisin and cut it into 4, just chop them like you would lettuce until you have a bunch of small pieces.[spacer height=”20px”]
Step 4 – Cut the Hay
Using scissors or a sharp knife, cut the hay into half-inch pieces, or about ¾ of the inner diameter of the toilet paper tube.
Step 5 – Cut the tubes
Take the roll, cut it into 5 rings using scissors. They should be about a 1.5cm thick.
Assembly
Step 1 – Mix the ingredients
Mix the pellet powder, banana paste, and raisin pieces until you get a dough like paste. Using a spoon, fold the mixture a few dozen times.
Folding means lifting up the mixture, turning it over, and smooshing it back down on itself. Add some extra banana if the mixture is too dry and doesn’t stick to itself, or add a few drops of water, both work.
Once it’s nice and uniform, and dough-like, add the hay. The hay will help unify the paste and make it stronger when it’s dry.
Step 2 – Use the cardboard rolls as moulds
Take a clump of the dough like mixture, put it on a cutting board and shape into a little bump. Then, push in the cardboard circle, and using your thumb, flatten the mixture into a nice little puck.
With your thumb, make sure you compress the puck nice and tight. The ‘tightness’ will make it less prone to crumbling when it’s dry.
Step 3 – Make more!
Make a bunch more. Also, with your thumb, plug in a raisin in there nice and tight! You can try making a little hole first. In my pictures, I doubled the recipe (making some for a friend), so you might end up with 4 or 5 instead of 9 like me.
Step 4 – The Oven
Turn off the oven.
Put the tray into the oven. It’s important to always remember that you’re not baking anything. You’re ‘drying’ out your mixture. Our goal is to avoid any ‘baking’ effects such as browning. You want your end result to be dry, and nice and green!
Give it about 30 minutes, then turn the oven back on to 200. When it reaches 200, turn it off again. Wait 30 minutes. Do that one more time.
Turn the oven on to 200, wait until the temperature gets there, turn it off, wait 30 minutes.
Then, take the little pucks out, and gently turn them over. Repeat the above steps 3 times. Oven on, oven off, wait 30 minutes. 3 times.
Once all that is done, take the pucks out, turn them over again, and let them stand for a whole hour.
Step 4.1 – Meanwhile… we prepare the other tubes!
Take 2 cardboard tubes and cut them in half.
Step 4.2 – Make end pieces for the tubes
This is the fun part. We all know the usual way of putting a treat inside half a carboard tube; folding in the ends, and watching a bunny destroy it. This will add an additional level of difficulty to the challenge![spacer height=”20px”]
Depending on how many pucks you ended up making, or your patience, you need to make 2 end pieces with little tags for each of your tubes. Take a tube, trace the outside, make a circle. On each opposite end, add a little tag, like in the picture above.
Our goal is to make pieces like the one on the top right side. Using scissors, cut the pieces, making the circles about a millimeter or two smaller than the line you drew, so they’ll fit inside the tube! Like this:
Step 4.3 – Cut slits for the tags
The Banana Raisin Puck will go inside the tube, in the middle, so the end pieces have to be about a centimeter or so from the bottom. Don’t worry about all the details, just make slits for one end. We’ll call it ‘the bottom’.
Then, you need to insert the end piece inside the tube. It’s not as hard as it looks. Bend the end piece slightly, and with the pointy end of the V push it inside the tube.
When the tags line up with the slits, push on the folded side from the opposite end, and it should pop right in. Once you get the hang of it, it takes seconds.
Remember to make the slits a little bit bigger than the tabs, and when you cut the slits, select the end pieces you’ll use beforehand and match the slit size to the tag.
Step 5 – Release the treat!
Once the treats have had an hour to stand and dry out even further, it’s time to take them out of the mould. First using your fingers, gently push around the top edge of the circle to loosen everything.
Finish the job by gently inserting a knife into the edge and running it around the treat. Turn it over, wiggle it a little to see if the treat wants to release, if not insert the knife again from the bottom to loosen it even further.
Take your time. If you go too fast, the treat might crumble. If you’re seeing that the tread isn’t completely dry, put it back in the oven, at 175, for 30 minutes.
Step 6 – Treat goes in, top goes on!
Once you get the little treat out, put it inside the tube. Cut two more slits on each side a little above where the top of the treat ends. Insert another cover piece and you’re almost done!
The last part is just folding the ends!
And there you have it!
Wrap Up
My rabbit loves these things. He picks them up, carries them around, throws them, pushes them with his nose, and simply adores destroying them to get to the delicious treat inside!
The raisin pieces add both smell and increased reward to the process. His odds of finding a little raisin piece inside the already tasty banana-infused mixture continuously keep him motivated in his quest to get deeper inside the tube.
Best of all, not only is it great fun for your bun, but it’s really fun to watch as well!
Finally, remember, as, with any treat, they should only ever be given occasionally. Always provide a healthy balanced diet for your rabbit and don’t promote poor health or obesity by giving excessive treats.
