Kitchen Adventures: Cooking a “Tweet Tart” for your “Tweetie Pies”



This week, I focused my kitchen experiments to food for our outdoor feathered friends. Seed-embedded suet cakes have traditionally been a mid-winter treat in the feeders at my house. The birds need the extra fat for energy during these cold months.

Suet can be easy to prepare, and there are lots of recipes available on the internet. Basically the process involves melting suet (a specific type of fat found around the organs of cattle), and adding to it other food stuffs, like peanut butter, cornmeal, and seeds, etc. The mixture is then poured into molds, and kept in a refrigerator or unheated garage until ready to use.

Trouble is, between now and the time I made this at my old house (maybe 5 years ago), butchers and meat markets no longer seem to receive entire beef carcasses, and the meat locker/processor has removed the suet before beef reaches the store. The only fat that a local butcher will have is subcutaneous fat, most of which they need to add to hamburger and sausages.

After asking at every butcher shop I thought would be most likely to carry it and coming up empty, (I didn’t bother with WalMart, etc.) I thought my days of making homemade suet for our birds was over. Thankfully, one of my knitting friends heard me talking about my quest at a recent knit group. She happened to run across suet for sale by a local beef raiser at a holiday farmer’s market, and picked up a bag for me. I’ve never been so happy to receive a bag of fat! (Thanks, “J”!)

In celebration - and inspired by Cooking for the Birds, I decided to go a bit crazy with my suet production. The suet cakes I made are not in that book, but the author’s ideas, photos and recipes certainly got my creative juices pumping.

I first made a crust for the suet tart by melting suet, adding lots of cornmeal, and just a little bit of seed.





I pressed part of the mixture in the bottom of the tart pan, and set it in the refrigerator to cool.



With a solid base, I then pressed more of the mixture around the sides of the pan, and put it back in the refrigerator.



Now for the filling. For that I melted more suet, and added lots of crunchy peanut butter, some cornmeal (proportionally less than for the crust), and more seed (proportionally more than in the crust).



I removed the pan from the heat, and added chopped raisins and cranberries to the mixture.



The spooned the mixture into the crust, placing it back in the refrigerator to cool.



Once they were solid, I turned the pans upside down and gently pushed on the center of the tins to encourage the tarts to pop out. (With all that grease built in to the crust, you better believe they did!) I then took some creamy peanut butter and melted it in the microwave a few seconds to liquefy it. The peanut butter is piped around the edge of the crust, and sunflower seeds are pressed in to it. A cranberry garnish is added to the center.





Three suet cakes ready for the next bird black tie ball, hostess gifts, or to keep on-hand for surprise visitors bearing gifts.