Baking to Get Baked

Bizarrely, the only time I’ve ever been involved in making hash brownies – as opposed to hash browns, a very different thing – was when my grandmother, living with longterm pain, decided for some inexplicable reason that I, alone among her grandchildren, would be able to score the active ingredient.

Medicinal cannabis remains illegal in the UK, so, with street resin secured, melted and crumbled, we whisked it up into a perfectly standard chocolate brownie recipe.

For weeks, it did the trick. Granny grazed on brownies; her muscles relaxed; and her pain reduced.

Yet the vagueness got to her.

I’d receive strange, slightly spaced but very zen phonecalls. She couldn’t find her stamps, though she was sure she’d put them somewhere or other. She was vague about times.

And, for older people, the vagueness is disconcerting. When you live, day in, day out with the fear of Alzheimer’s and memory loss, getting baked on brownies is the last thing you need.

So she reverted to her old medicine – a substance potent enough to be widely trafficked as a street drug, with numerous side-effects but not the vagueness of old-school hash – and retired from weed for the duration.

Cannabis isn’t a great ingredient to cook with, to be honest. In the party hotspots of South-East Asia, it’s served as part of a pizza topping – never order a Happy Pizza unless that’s what you actually want – or blended with equally unpalatable ingredients like shrooms into a shake.

Yet the resinous flavour of the solid can make it bearable, at least, when paired with rich-flavoured ingredients like chocolate – hell, you can even expand beyond brownies and mix it into a round of chocolate truffles.

And, if you’re lucky enough to live in a region where weed is legal, and you’d like to experiment with cannabis cuisine, this insanely detailed collection of pot recipes should have you mulling the fine art of cannabis butter over hash oil, and cooking up everything from bread to chocolate truffles.

Image: brownies…yawn…boooring by jeffreyw on Flickr’s Creative Commons.