A few years ago, we astonished a friend when we confessed to not knowing what a Mallomor was. By virtue of context, (and Google), it didn’t take long for us to learn that a Mallomar is graham cracker and marshmallow dipped in chocolate. It’s a seasonal item from Nabisco only available in cold winter months because when the confection first came out in the early 1900s, there weren’t refrigerator trucks, and the chocolate would melt during delivery if it wasn’t winter. These days, the item is still seasonal, but now it’s all about hard-to-get hype (think Coors Beer back in the 80s).

What this has to do with dogs is, well, nothing, actually, except that in the course of educating ourselves about Mallomars (did you know there are 60 calories in one of them?), there’s something called a Whippet:

The Whippet is evidently Canada’s answer to the Mallomar, another biscuit based cookie topped with marshmallow-like filling and a hard shell of chocolate. Whippet cookies were introduced in 1927, though they’d been already made and distributed under the name “Empire” as early as 1901.  Whippets are still produced in Montreal, and are now available with both dark chocolate and milk chocolate coatings, and with several flavors of artificial fruit jam filling inside the marshmallow-like filling.

As our readers are dog people, we know you won’t be offended by this next part, but the cookies (or biscuits, for our Brit friends)  are also referred to as ‘Nun’s Farts’ in the Anglophone community of Montreal area. We don’t honestly know what the visual properties are of a nun’s fart, but it’s been suggested that the dark chocolate coating/white marshmallow filling is suggestive of the black and white habits of certain orders of Quebec nuns. Why the cookies wouldn’t have been nicknamed “penguin” for the same reason is up for debate.

If all this talk is making you hungry for cookies, we can’t help you with the baking part, but we can mention Whippet cookie cutters!

The internet (and especially Etsy.com) is filled with breed shaped cookie cutters, and the ones above are sold by imagineacookie.

Getting back to Mallomars. We’ve read that they can be purchased at most chain grocery stories and Walmart, but if you don’t have either in your area, there’s always Amazon.

And then there are the folks who are the of the “homemade or nothing” school of thought, and for you, we have the recipe for how to make a Whippet, and how to bake your own Mallamar.

Suddenly, do we look fatter to you for having written this?