Homemade Wild Bird Seed Cakes

Watching wild birds can be an enjoyable activity you can engage in from the comfort of your own home. Creating homemade bird seed cakes will welcome birds into your yard and encourage visits from many different species of wild birds. You can make simple bird treats by mixing rendered beef fat, known as suet, with bird seed, nuts, dried fruits or anything else that your local birds enjoy eating.

  1. Rendered Suet

    • Suet is beef fat that has been rendered to prevent the suet from rotting quickly when it is placed outdoors in warm weather. Many birds enjoy suet, and in cold winter months, this fat can provide nutrients that omnivorous birds would obtain from eating insects or worms during the summer. You can make your own suet by saving the fat when you cook beef and keeping it in the refrigerator to avoid spoiling. Once you have acquired about three cups of fat, melt it in a large saucepan until the fat turns to liquid. Strain the fat through a mesh wire strainer into a second saucepan. Allow the fat to cool and harden and then repeat the process to create rendered suet.

      Suet can sometimes be purchased from butcher shops. You may still need to render the suet to ensure that it becomes hard when you are forming your wild bird seed cakes, so be sure to ask if the suet has been rendered before you purchase it. Rendered suet is also sometimes called tallow and will not require any additional melting or cooling before use.

    Bird Seed Cake Recipe

    • Heat 3 cups of rendered suet in a large saucepan just until the suet has softened enough that you can stir it with a wooden spoon. The suet does not need to be completely liquefied. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in 1 1/2 cups peanut butter, 1 1/2 cups corn meal and 3 cups wild bird seed. Mix everything together. The mixture should resemble a thick cake batter. Spoon the bird seed batter into a 12-cup muffin tin lined with paper cupcake liners. Press both ends of a 6-inch piece of nylon cord into the center of each bird seed cake to create a loop for hanging the cakes when they have finished setting. Place the muffin tin in the refrigerator until the cakes are hard. Now you can remove the cakes from the paper liners and hang them outside for the birds to enjoy.