I have always hung out a birdfeeder in our yard at the different houses we have owned. I don’t know if it was the lack of trees, the type of birdseed or the busyness of the neighborhood but I have never been very successful getting birds to the feeder. More often than not, the birdseed got wet and rancid before it would get eaten.
I decided to try a different route here on our new property. I bought some suet cakes from Peavy Mart and a suet cake cage. I hung out only about 1/4 of the cake. Each time I put some out it would get eaten but only on cooler or rainy days. This makes sense because birds look for fattier foods to keep themselves warm. I decided to hold off putting out more suet cakes until the weather got cooler as the birds have lots of food to forage right now.
In an effort to save some money and also make the cakes more attractive to the birds, I decided to make some from scratch. Most of the recipes I came across used either lard or beef fat, cornmeal, birdseed, nuts or dried berries and peanut butter.
I decided to buy lard for this first batch. I do collect bacon and beef drippings in a can by my sink but did not have quite enough. We buy the big tub of peanut butter from Costco because it is such a good price but I never can eat it all before it gets stale so some of it can go in these cakes. Another Costco purchase was a big bag of dried cranberries that my husband swore he would eat; he won’t miss what I took out. I don’t normally have cornmeal on hand so I bought a bag and that will be enough for many cakes in the future. As for the birdseed, I had some leftover from trying to feed the birds in Fort McMurray.
Ingredients
3 cups birdseed with sunflowers seeds
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 cup lard or beef fat
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup raisins or other dried berry
Directions
Combine the birdseed, cornmeal and dried fruit in a large mixing bowl.
Put lard or fat in a microwavable bowl or measuring cup for 1 min. Stir in peanut butter and microwave another 30 seconds. Stir until mostly smooth.
Combine the wet with the dry and stir until combined. It should be the consistency of thick wet sand like at the beach. If it needs thickening, add a bit more cornmeal.
Pour or spoon into parchment lined loaf pans or an 8X8 lined cake pan. My suet cage can accommodate a cake that is about one inch thick. I filled my smaller loaf pans about 2/3 full and a larger one not even halfway.
These went straight into the freezer to harden. I removed them the next day and they had firmed up nicely.
It was very easy to remove the parchment paper and slide the two smaller ones into a ziplock sandwich bag but cutting the larger one in half took a bit of work. I think I will move a cake to the fridge the night before I want to put it outside if I want to cut it into smaller sections.
I want to dry some of the saskatoons that I picked and add them to my next batch. Some robins were eating the leftover berries on one of the trees in the yard this past week. They seem to enjoy them more once they start to prune up and dry.
We are expecting some cooler rainy weather next week so I might try a piece of one of one of the cakes to see how it holds together, how attractive it is to the birds and whether it gets too soft when the sun hits it. If this combination doesn’t work, I will try something different.
**UPDATE Nov 2022: I discovered that there is no point in putting out these suet cakes until the daytime high goes below +5. Any warmer than that and the lard starts to melt and drip in the sun. We now have Blue Jays, Downy Woodpeckers, Nuthatches and Black-called Chickadees enjoying the suet.
Seeing birds in the yard year round always perks up my mood so I want to come up with the perfect suet cake recipe to encourage them stay around.