Suet Cakes

Yesterday we started working on our suet cakes for the chickens & turkeys.  We've made these in small batches, but I decided to do a huge batch and cut them into smaller portions.  These tasty snacks will get them through the winter hopefully without losing too much weight or condition.  We start with our basic COB mixture.....Corn, Oats, Barley....

To that we add black oil sunflower seeds, whole corn, calfmanna, and peanuts, then spread it out in a full-sized sheet pan...

For the binder we use lard that we rendered from our hogs and peanut butter....3 quarts of lard in all and 2 jars of creamy peanut butter...

We melt the lard and peanut butter together until smooth and creamy, then pour it over the grain mixture...

Let it cool to set up for a few minutes....place it in the freezer overnight to harden....

I wish I'd have gotten pictures of the next step, but when you pull the pan out of the freezer....put it face down with one end propped off the counter....then use a hair dryer across the back of the pan until the cake falls out of the pan.  You end up with something that looks like this....(try to ignore the well-dressed dog in the background)...

From there you attempt to cut it into small cakes...I did this while it was still frozen to allow us to cut into bars and wrap them....

But I ended up with a lot of this as well.....

Ending up with 17 nice sized portions plus some crumbles left to give the birds a treat this morning...I've wrapped each one in butcher paper and put in the freezer.  Using one or two a week for the birds should get them through the worst part of the winter. I wasn't sure how the huge batch would turn out, but overall I think I'll do it this way each year.  The hardest part of the whole thing is getting it in the freezer without spilling.  Lettting it set up a few minutes solved that problem.