Project 52 - Week 11 - Start Making Seed Cakes to Feed the Birds

This week has flown by so quickly and I must admit that I haven't really properly focused on completing things on my to do list, so today I needed to think of something quite simple that I could complete in time to post.  This task is something that I've been meaning to do for a while. 

Inspired by Penny at The Hen House, as I've read her blog post on this, and by the fact that I always have a bowl in the fridge which I fill with left over fat from cooking, to prevent it going down the sink. 

In the past, I have tended to either throw waste fat in the waste to go to landfill or lately, put it in the food waste for recycling into compost.  As I'm not sure how easy it is to recycle a large lump of fat into compost, I've decided that this idea is a much better option and if it brings lots of lovely birds into the garden, even better.  It's also another tiny step on my Zero Waste journey.

I bought some bird seed whilst out grocery shopping the other day, £1.49 for 1kg from Tesco, but I'm sure you can probably buy it cheaper from other sources. 

I used some small foil trays as moulds, that I salvaged when tidying out the baking drawer last week and put them aside for the purpose.

The fat looks pretty disgusting.

I melted the fat over the hob in an old baking tray and poured it into a bowl along with the bird seed before spooning it into the moulds.

In this batch I was able to make about 8 cakes from a pudding bowl full of fat and half a bag of seed.  I then put them in the fridge to set, after which I will be cutting them out of the mould with a butter knife and skewering them so that I can feed string through the hole and hang them.  They're not quite solid yet, but are getting there I hope.

 

 

I'm pleased with the results so far and will post when I get them strung up.  Thank you Penny for the inspiration.   I look forward to seeing if they get eaten and by whom.

Joining in with Dreamer at Living a Slow and Simple Life in trying to complete a task a week in the Project 52 challenge.