Getting baked...

 Obviously, once we had our cannabutter, we wanted to bake with it. Book in particular had a lot of ideas - garlic bread, cookies, cupcakes, brownies, heaps of toast etc.

Based purely upon the ingredients we had in the kitchen, I suggested something a bit simpler. A fairly basic shortbread recipe, which I'd made before. To indulge Book, I gave her carte blanche to add copious amounts of chocolate chips to zhuzh it up a bit.

I'll grant you, it doesn't look like much. 

The cannabutter was interesting to bake with. We found that it separated a little bit in the jar we were storing it in, with a small amount of water pooling at the bottom. It still smelled very green and I was surprised to discover that this carried through even when it was baked. I think you could taste it, too. It wasn't unpleasant but it did add a slightly verdant tang, which I don't typically have in my cookies. But it behaved like normal butter, as best as I could tell.

Now, did it affect us?

The difficult thing about making edibles at home, with shake, is that it's really difficult to work out the dosing. We had made around 250g of cannabutter, less 10g for Book's toast. That 10g seemed to be a reasonable dose - not so strong as to have anyone locked to the sofa, but enough to give a bit of a buzz. I calculated that to mean that we'd want approximately 10g of cannabutter per biscuit, which meant using around 120g of our cannabutter.

Nobody was completely off their face but I definitely found it affected me and Book said the same. It wasn't as strong as vaping but it was enough to make my brain kind of sandy (I honestly have no idea how else to describe how it feels) and my limbs feel heavy. Book got very chatty and emotional - her typical response - and SK was a little 'floaty'. 

So we considered it a success.

And, of course, success is to be replicated.

OK, please excuse the state of my baking tray. It's well loved and I hadn't realised how grim it looks. I promise it's clean!

Again, I left Book in charge of choosing a recipe. Never one to do things simply, she chose a caramel stuffed NYC style cookie from one of my recipe books. 

We found that the water at the bottom of the jar mixed back into the butter easily - although in hindsight, I'm not sure that we weren't meant to discard it - and again aimed for 10g of cannabutter per cookie. I'm very familiar with the recipe for these cookies; I've made numerous variants of them in the past, so I knew what we were expecting texture and consistency-wise. I don't think the cannabutter behaved any differently to normal butter. Again, you could smell and taste the 'herbal' notes, but none of us seemed to find it off-putting. 

We actually made this batch of cookie dough to store in the freezer to bake off whenever we wanted them, which worked well. They froze well, baked as expected and tasted pretty great! The only flaw we found was user error - using toffees as opposed to softer caramels meant that you had a solid chunk of toffee in the middle of your cookie.

And, of course, if you're going to be eating freshly baked cookies, is there a better way to consume them than with a scoop of ice cream on top?!