Home-Made Suet Cakes for the Winter Season

Several years ago, the family Christmas present was a bird feeder, post, and some bird feed.  We have since added an old iron gate that was on the property when we bought our little homestead, along with some brackets for additional feeders, a home-made platform feeder and a water station.  We get year-round enjoyment watching the birds that visit our feeder.

If it's cold in the winter where you live, you can make these suet cakes for your birds.  I hesitate to recommend these for use in warmer weather, because I'm not sure about the melting temperature of the fat...but we use them in the cold weather with great success.

Suet cakes are not particularly expensive.  We are not necessarily saving a lot of money by making them.  We do it mostly because it's a fun thing to do for our feathered friends.

The library where I work has bird feeders, and patrons donate bird feed to help keep them filled.  Someone donated some suet cakes, and when I put those into the bird feeders, I saved the trays they came in.  Those trays are the molds we use to make our suet cakes at home.

There are two main components to a suet cake - the filler and the 'glue'.  Husband saves the excess fat when he cooks up ground beef.  He puts it into a bowl in the freezer, and that is the glue for our suet cakes.  Lots of the commercially made suet cakes have peanut butter in them - sometimes we add it to ours as well.  When we were cleaning out a cabinet at work, we found an open jar of peanut butter.  It was going to be thrown away, so I brought it home instead.  It gets used for the suet cakes and dog treats.

The fill is a mix of several things.  We use some bird feed - whatever blend we have on hand at the time - and some chicken scratch.  Daughter, who has a keen interest in ornithology, was hesitant to add chicken scratch at first, but conceded that the songbirds often eat it in the chicken run, so we add some to the suet cakes as well.  Sometimes we add in some dried mealworm treat, too.  You can also add bits of apple or orange peel, raisins, and other small pieces of dried fruits.

This batch has bird seed, chicken scratch, some sunflowers we grew,
dried mealworms, fine-chopped apple and chopped craisins.

I measure the filler by filling both molds, then pouring the filler into a mixing bowl.  This is the easiest way to make sure I have enough, but not too much.

It doesn't really take much of the fat/peanut butter mixture to hold it all together.  I melt a fair-size spoonful of fat, stir in peanut butter (this helps cool it some, too), then pour it over the filler.  You need enough to coat the filler well enough that it will hold it together.  For this batch 1/2 cup of beef fat and enough added peanut butter to make a total of 2/3 cup 'glue' was just right.

The fat is warm enough to melt the peanut butter.  Simply stir until
both are well combined, then pour over the bowl of filler.  

See how it's clinging together?  That's a good texture for the suet to mold well.

Simply stir to coat, then place in molds and press down firmly.  I use a piece of plastic wrap so the seeds don't stick to my hands.  The molds are flimsy, so I put them on a tray before I fill them.

One the molds are filled, I set them to freeze.  If it's cold outside, I put them in our cold gas grill (where the dogs can't get to them).  If it's not cold enough for that, I simply put them in the freezer to set.

Once they are frozen, we store them in our freezer.  I leave them in the mold and wrap them in plastic wrap.  We unmold them just before putting them into the suet feeder.

Have fun feeding your birds!