making cakes for the birds

Making cakes for the birds

We do love cakes in this house!  Yesterday my son helped me make some lovely Blueberry Muffins – they taste good!  This afternoon we decided we would be making cakes for the birds instead.

It’s getting more autumnal every day, and I’m conscious that our feathered friends will need some help to get them through the winter.  They miss out on our old bird table too, as it finally collapsed at the beginning of the year.  Need to get it replaced, but it never reaches the top of the pile.

Anyway, making cakes for the birds – today was our first attempt.  We’ve been saving yoghurt pots for a while and now we could put some of them to good use.

So what do you need?

Making cakes for the birds

You need – containers, yoghurt pots are great, string, suet or lard (we used lard), birdseed, raisins, peanuts, grated cheese, a mixing bowl and scissors – simple.

Leave the lard/suet out at room temperature to soften.  Once softened you are ready to make your bird cakes.

Pierce a hole in the bottom of your container, cut a length of string (remember to make it long enough to hang from something in the garden) and thread it through, then tie a knot in the inside.

making cakes for the birdsNext, take your mixing bowl and cut your lard/suet into small pieces and place in the bowl, and all the other ingredients and mix it all together.  Keep adding the ingredients until the fat holds it all nicely together.

making cakes for the birds

Then employ one nearly 4-year child to fill the containers with the bird cake mix…

making cakes for the birds

Once you’ve filled your containers, place them in the fridge for at least an hour to set.  Then you are ready to hang them in your garden.

making cakes for the birds

Now I know you can just pop down to your local supermarket, pet shop or DIY store and buy ready-made bird cakes – we’ve done that ourselves in the past.  But my son had so much fun today, making cakes for the birds, checking every five minutes to see if they’d set and then instructing me on where they needed to be hung.  Do I think he’d have been that bothered with the shop-bought cakes – nope! I can’t wait to see his little face when we see a bird having a little feast on our homemade cakes.

This is a simple Make ‘N’ Do project suggested to us by the RSPB team.  What do you put out for the birds at this time of year?

14 thoughts on “Making cakes for the birds

  1. Aw, love this. Miss M would love making this sort of thing too although the only birds that fly over our garden are seagulls!!! Hopefuly we’ll move soon then we can do more projects like this.

  2. What a really good idea 🙂 I am going to bookmark this and make it in a couple of weeks 🙂 Thank you for linking to PoCoLo x

  3. What a great activity. We are in a new build and after 3 years we’ve started getting birds visit, I’m not sure E is old enough for this (lard eating=vile) but I will pin and make some myself!!!!

    Popped over from PoCoLo.

    1. It’s wonderful when they do visit isn’t it. My last house was a new build and I’d gone from an old house with garden full of trees. I will never takes birds for granted again – I really missed them for a few years.

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