In the winter, we get really pumped to see all the birds in our backyard. They look especially beautiful against the white snow. We have a couple different feeders to lure them in but the suet cakes are one of the most popular. Comprised of fat drippings, dried fruit and nuts, I recently decided to make my own rather than buy them.
Because of my love of bacon, we tend to have plenty of drippings on hand. How do we collect them? We just pour the fat from the pan while it is still hot into a dedicated container we keep in the freezer. It's pretty simple.
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| Suet, or bacon fat. Clearly someone's excited. |
To make the suet cakes for our birds, I just took 1.5 cups softened suet, 1/2 cup nuts (I used peanuts and almonds- make sure they are plain and raw), and 1/2 cup dried, mixed berries and pulsed it around in a food processor until things are well incorporated.
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| Fruit &nuts for the cakes. |
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| Add in some suet. |
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| Then place in the mold. Voila! |
From there I just pressed the mixture into square molds that would fit in our feeders and froze the mixture in the mold for an hour. I had all the ingredients lying around and the actual process of putting it all together took about 15 minutes. I will say, it's a pretty messy ordeal as you're dealing with melted fat so beware!
1 comment:
Very cool! Had no idea they were this simple. Probably a dumb question, but is there any way to do this without bacon drippings? Coconut oil is the only alternative I can think of...
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