Baking a Fool of Myself: Budscotti - Beyond Butter

I am certain the future of commercially produced edibles belongs to the world of extracts, tinctures, and isolates due to their easy titration and high dose, low volume, nature.

This will require “the baker” to buy expensive, commercially produced extracts which almost never result in a delicious tasting edible. In my experience, products made this way taste a bit like earth dirt or ginseng.

Then there is the time-honored weed butter. It’s a cannabis, butter, and water stove top cook-off, followed by a cheesecloth strain or a skimming process. Sure, this long-winded undertaking leaves you with ready-to-use butter, but also a lot of recipe trial and error on its potency. Not to mention, your chosen recipe may not even call for butter.

Pre-grinding shake flour and weighing it up each time for each recipe is the simplest way to achieve the potency you are striving for (See Baking a Fool of Myself, March/April Maximum Yield Cannabis, page 74). Pre-ground shake also gives you the opportunity to use different fats, oils, or alcohols in conversion and does not pigeon-hole you into butter only recipes. Plus, you do not have to strain the shake flour out. I like to grind it fine and leave it in. Easy peasy!

Focusing my column on the home baker helps to keep costs low and imaginations high. If you can grow a plant or two, your expenses will be almost nil after the ingredients. If you can get the hang of my Marijuana Recipes Made Easy technique, there is no end to what you can produce and with such ease.

Any recipe containing a fat or alcohol of some kind is good for converting shake flour. Marijuana can be such a great flavor if you have some experience combining it with other ingredients. It has a sweet taste when cooked that you’ll need to complement. So, I compiled a list of a few ingredients I find go great with cannabis in recipes:

Warm spices, mint, chocolate, black teas, black sambuca, dark rum, sharp cheeses, fennel seeds, ground lamb, fatty salmon, spicy chillies, dates, nut butters, havla, and mangos.

Home Bakers Unite!

Recipe: High Tea Budscotti

Ingredients List

(I recently took a pastry class and the instructors insist on weighing vs. measuring. So, don’t put your scale away after you’ve weighed up your shake flour)

Sift

• 90 g granulated sugar
• 125 g all purpose flour
• 1 g baking powder
• 1 g baking soda
• 2 g salt
• 5 g of shake flour

Add

• 2 tea bags of earl grey tea leaves
• 60 grams of cold unsalted butter
• 1 egg whisked

Directions

1. Sift all dry ingredients, except tea leaves, together in a big bowl.
2. Cut open 2 earl grey tea bags and pour out the contents into the dry ingredients.
3. Cut the cold butter into small chunks
4. Add the cold butter to sifted dry ingredients and rub all together with your hands until the mixture looks like a bit sandy
5. Drop the slightly whisked egg into center of sandy flour mixture then mix it in with a fork
6. Pour the mixture onto the counter and press together with your hands just until it becomes a smooth dough
7. Form dough into log and wrap with plastic to chill for 30 minutes before baking
8. Bake log at 350°F until golden brown and/or an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Pressing the top gently to see if it rebounds back up is also a good sign it’s done.
9. Let log cool until warm before cutting into one-centimeter slices.
10. Lay them flat and bake again at 240°F for an hour to let it all toast up nice and dry

This recipe makes approximately 15 cookies depending on how you slice it. Literally! You could make two smaller logs and bake that way for smaller servings. I like one big long Budscotti for dipping into my cappuccino repeatedly.

This is a great edible conversion recipe because it cooks twice in the oven and has a longer shelf life due to lack of moisture in the cookie.

The Budscotti actually tastes better a few days later giving the earl grey some time to fuse with other ingredients. I keep my Budscotti stored in a large, tight-lidded mason jar to keep fresh longer. Mind you this last recipe barely lasted 3 days in my house.

Tasting better every day!