Canine Bakery Sniff The Cook Puts the Doodle in Snickerdoodle

Too bad Lori Elam wasn’t downtown with her trailer full of homemade dog snacks during January’s prolonged power outage, when hotels filled up with pets. The proprietor of Sniff The Cook dog treat bakery would have been the most popular human in a district full of doodles and dachshunds.

As it was, Elam weathered the winter in her adorable Mt. Juliet bakery, prepping cookies and cakes for her loyal canine clients, who live literal dogs’ lives of birthdays, gotcha days and puppy gender reveals.

Lifelong baker Elam has been doling out doggie delicacies professionally for about five years, since she bought the Three Dog Bakery location in Mt. Juliet’s Providence Station. In November 2025, she rebranded the enterprise as Sniff The Cook, which she now operates independently, using recipes she developed on her own and taste-tested with four-legged friends, including shop dogs Ellie the black lab and Duke the golden lab mix.

“I want to be able to control everything I put in my dogs’ mouths,” says Elam, who began cooking and compiling a cookbook for her own dogs 15 years ago. That’s when friends started asking her to share her pet treat recipes. “I wanted to create a healthy treat for my dogs and others, because we want our dogs to live as long as they can,” she explains. “Starting with good food is half the battle.”

Like a people-focused pâtisserie, Sniff The Cook features cases of colorful cakes, cupcakes and cookies anchored by natural vegetarian ingredients: whole wheat, chickpea and rice flours, carrots, and honey and applesauce sweeteners. In lieu of artificial colors and dyes, Elam and her bakery team — including Rachel Miller and Katie Lunn — decorate with natural hues from beet powder, turmeric and spinach, giving whimsical dinosaur- and dog-shaped biscuits the familiar vibrancy of a cheerful confectionary.

“The first thing people say is, ‘Are these for dogs?’” Elam reports of her repertoire of custom cakes and seasonal cookies. To be sure, Elam bakes with dogs in mind, but she knows plenty of cats who enjoy the treats. In an effort to include her clients’ felines, Sniff The Cook also stocks cat treats and toys and other pet accessories.

And what’s on the menu for Sniff The Cook’s human clients? While all the ingredients are “human-grade,” the canine confections — made without butter, white sugar or cream — are less sweet than human snackers might be used to, Elam says. But, she adds, “The frosting does taste like buttercream.”