HOW TO MAKE CHRISTMAS COOKIE EDIBLES

Holidays are meant to be a time of celebration and largely revolve around food. While the holidays are a wonderful time, they can also be stressful. To kick off your holiday in a mellow fashion, enhance your baking with some Christmas cookie edibles. For those who haven't gotten into cooking with their favorite strain, this is a solid gateway.

Holiday cookies are meant to be decorated and are often as known for their icings, sprinkles, and flair as the base cookie. This provides ways to customize your tastes and adjust dosages.

Christmas cookies also use copious amounts of butter, and that matters when injecting them with that edible goodness.

STEP BY STEP CHRISTMAS COOKIE EDIBLES

Ideally, each of these steps is straight-forward and thorough. In practice, each step takes some tweaking.

Some of these tweaks are about adjusting the recipe to make your kind of cookie. Others are about dialing-in for your cookware, stove, and even climate.

Ingredients

• 1/2 - 2/3 cup cannabutter, softened
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 egg, medium-large
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup AP flour

This yields 2 dozen small cookies or about a dozen medium-sized

STEP 1. DECARBING AND PREPPING

Luckily, we are getting to the point that most people know you can't just cook cannabis into something and hope to get much out of it.

In simple terms, if you don't heat your product, you lose most of its goodness.

There are two primary methods to decarboxylate your chosen cannabis: dry oven and solvent.

For the oven, you will be grinding the cannabis and then baking it between parchment paper on a tray for 45 minutes at around 220 degrees F. Start checking it at the 30 min mark until you see those terpenes leaking out around the grains.

For the solvent, which is recommended, you will use a slow cooker and some oil to gently infuse over time. Butter burns because of the fats inside, so you want to use coconut oil or clarified butter to get started. Pop everything in the cooker and wait between 4-6 hours.

After the cooking, you need to strain the liquids out to save and discard the solid material. A cheesecloth will net the best results, but a fine strainer will do. When using a cheesecloth, let the material drip strain, don't squeeze the cloth.

STEP 2. MAKING CANNABUTTER

Either method you use to decarb, you will want roughly a 1:1 ratio of cannabis to cooking material.

If you are using the solvent method, you'll have more liquid but totally liquid butter isn't great for cookies, so mix that with softened butter to get a more useful cookie-ready consistency.

This recipe calls for 1/2 - 2/3 cup butter. So you want to go 1/4 a cup of butter to 1/4 a cup of solvent oil. That will give you a full 1/2 cup of cannabutter.

For the dry method, you want to kick up the butter to 1/2 cup and mix in your decarbed cannabis. This will yield closer to 2/3 cup cannabutter, but it is less dense, so it evens out in the baking process.

STEP 3. PREHEAT AND PREPARE

Now it's time to construct the actual cookies.

Preheat your oven to 375 F about 15 minutes before you intend to bake.

Place parchment paper on a baking sheet and set that aside. If you are doing a dozen, one sheet will do, if two dozen, prep two sheets. They can both be baked at the same time so no need to wait around between.

Parchment paper is better than greasing the sheet to preserve flavor and not cook out your cannabis onto the baking sheet (it will reabsorb some in the cooling time if on parchment paper).

STEP 4. WET INGREDIENTS

Start making the dough by taking your cannabutter and sugar and that touch of salt and cream them together. This means medium-high speed on a stand mixer or electric and some serious elbow-grease if you do it by hand.

The consistency of your wet ingredients affects the taste distribution of your cookie. Aim for a fluffy and somewhat pale cream. it will resemble grainy frosting.

Beat the egg until lightly bubbly and mix in your vanilla. Let this rest for a few minutes; some even refrigerate for five minutes before you toss the vanilla-egg into the creamed ingredients.

STEP 5. DRY INGREDIENTS

The only actual dry ingredient in this recipe is the flour, sift it to evenly distribute and reduce clumps before tossing it in with your wet ingredients. Mix the flour on low for an extra few minutes.

This recipe doesn't use leavening agents like cream of tartar or baking powder. Many sugar recipes do, but those leavening agents consume acids in the dough to create CO2 and produce rising. The major source of acid in your cookies is cannabis, don't let the leavening agents eat your stash!

STEP 6. SHAPING AND CUTTING

Set aside the dough in a bag and chill it for about 1 hour in the fridge. This will bind the dough and make it hold together while you get it shaped and into the oven.

Pull out the dough, roll it out, and cut whatever shapes you want like gingerbread people, wreaths, candy canes, snowmen and more.

For simple rounds, don't roll out the dough, just wind them into balls and drop them on your prepared sheets.

STEP 7. BAKING

Bake cookies for 12 to 15 minutes, checking up on them every two minutes after the 10 min mark to ensure they are the right amount of done without burning them.

Let the cookies rest for a few minutes on the baking sheet. Remove the cookies from the baking sheet and place them on a cooling rack until they are room temperature.

STEP 8. DECORATING YOUR COOKIES

Decorating cookies is the whole reason to make Christmas cookies, edibles or not. Bust out your favorite icing, toss in some food coloring, top with candy and go nuts.

If you want the cookies themselves to have some color, toss food color in during the creaming stage.

Looking for something extra? Try this recipe for rum buttercream frosting. Perfect for sugar cookies laced with a 1tsp of ginger in the dry ingredient phase.

STEP 9. ENJOY!

You'll probably spend more time adjusting your cookie recipe than your cannabutter technique as you learn to make Christmas cookie edibles. That said, the dosage on your cookies takes some getting used to. It's better to portion that out by cookie size.

Eat one at a time and give yourself some time between, don't overdose from eating too many cookies while waiting for the slow-release of edible cannabis.

Best rule? Always bake some regular cookies alongside your cookie edibles to cure your sweet tooth without straining yourself.

Check out more cannabis lifestyle tips and articles and contact us to learn more about ordering and strain choices.