Ricky, is your use of mint a large contributor in masking the flavor of the cannabis? I make salves for my husband's neuropathy and occasionally some baked goods. I've not made cannabutter either, just hate to throw anything still worth using, so after making the salve, I toss the cannabis into a batch of brownies. Obvious cannabis taste, but still effective. He does NOT like mint, hence the reason for my question.

No, the mint is not totally necessary. There's enough flavor from the chocolate and the vanilla extract. I just like the added coolness of the mint.

In terms of cannabutter, don't sweat throwing out the vegetative matter at the end of the process. It's worthless by the time you're done. The chemo patients complained about the taste in the beginning, so that's always been a prime concern.

I have eaten cookies in Seattle and brownies in Jamaica and both had a heavy cannabis flavor. It's not the worst taste in the world, but if you're eating these on a regular basis, you really don't want that taste in your mouth.

Ricky, as cookies, they look appetizing, but do try to consider the overall presentation in your photos? Placed individually on a plate might have been better than the, er, pile, especially in the thread preview. :)

Have you considered steeping your own mint rather than using extract?

I think your presentation is fine. But, if you do not use cannabutter, in what way do you include the cannabis?

In testing a cookie, I make it without cannabutter first. When I make the cookies for the patients, I simply substitute cannabutter for the regular butter. If the recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter, I use 2 sticks of butter to make cannabutter.

Donna_loomis, as Bill Bryson says, think like a 14 year old boy, and look at the picture again, especially in thumbnail form.

plllog - my goal with the photo is to show the exterior and interior of the finished product. Not quite sure what sort of presentation works better. A plate of cookies might look more appetizing but as a baker, I like to see inside and outside.

I guess I have no imagination. I don't see anything risqué or odd. Maybe I need to eat a cookie.

Sorry. I'll be more frank. The broken open one isn't the issue. :) When I first saw it on the preview, and sticking with me until now, was the thought "Who put a picture of poop up?" I'm actually glad that neither of you see that! They do look like good cookies. But the pile wasn't the best choice. A little paper towel showing between the individual cookies would do the trick. ;)

LOL, Plllog, I'd not thought of that at all, until you said it and then I had to go back and see. So you made me look. (grin)

Actually, they look very good, and sometimes I like mint with chocolate, other times I'm just not in the mood for that, so I'd happy to know they would be good without.

Having never consumed, smoked, purchased, grown or possessed cannabis, my cookies will be done "without". (grin) I'm not opposed to the use of any substance if it's medically helpful, If edibles were legal and available in Michigan, well, I have two daughters and a grandson who have seizure disorders and I wouldn't count that out if it were found to be helpful.

Annie

annie - Michigan does have medical cannabis and edibles are readily available. I have a customer in Ann Arbor who uses edibles to control seizures with great success.

Ricky, have you heard any feedback or do you have knowledge of the effectiveness of synthetic THC??? A friend has chronic headaches and one of many failed attempts at treating them was a pill of synthetic THC. Is it as effective as real plant/extract/smoke? I'm doubting it.

It doesn't work. Two of my chemo patients tried it and had no results at all. The best results I've seen and read about are from extracts / tinctures of pure THC or CBD, depending on the illness.

Thanks. That's what I suspected and I tried to convince my friend to get the real thing... not sure if she can in the state she's in. :(

I'm a long way from 14, but my initial 'hit' was like plllog's. Both times I checked your picture, my monitor lighting was not the best, and I couldn't even tell that you had two pieces of cut cookie. It was essentially a dark mass of, well...

But glad that things are working well.

I'm guessing you're not looking at the photo on a large computer monitor. Either way, next time I'll be certain to make the presentation much clearer.

Are you trying to make an appealing photo for customers? There are any number of tutorials online for optimizing food photography. The cookies look like nice & fudgy, but I agree the presentation could be better, if that's important. A white china plate looks better than paper toweling, I think.

FWIW, the most successful masking of cannabis flavor I've come across were spicy little oyster/soup-sized crackers - garlic, parmesan, oregano & pepper did the trick. I think they were infused w/ oil, then coated w/ seasonings.

No. The photo is strictly for this forum. I wanted to show the finished product - inside and out. The thing I first noticed upon cutting a cookie in half is that none of the chips made it into the center of the cookie. They all ended up on or just below the surface, making them gooey until they were chilled in the fridge.

If you go back and look at the threads I've started with photos of baked products, you'll see that all of them show the interior and exterior. A loaf of bread looks totally different when you cut it open. Same goes for cookies.

Keep in mind that it's illegal to sell these or to advertise the sale of food that contains a Schedule 1 narcotic... regardless of how stupid that is in the case of cannabis. You'll notice that at no time do I say anything about selling these to my chemo patients. (This paragraph is just in case big brother is watching.)

Ricky, I spent 35 years running the local Prosecutor's Office, so breaking the law at all was out of the question. My record is so squeaky clean that I've never even had a parking ticket. Now, fines and penalties depend on the area. Ann Arbor happens to have one of those $10 ticket penalties. My area? Well, it's a lot more expensive and it's still illegal federally.

I've never seen anyone in this area that had/has edibles of any kind. Our local "dispensaries" just keep doing things like having 200 "clients" when they are only legally allowed to have 12 or something like that. So one big grow operation springs up, violates law, gets shut down, all their equipment is forfeited and the cycle repeats itself. My daughter works for a nursing home and is required to be drug tested, so she uses it, she loses her job. My youngest daughter is married to a police officer. My grandson is 11, and children have been taken from their parents here for abuse after being provided with cannibis. So, until the law changes, we have the "perfect storm" of circumstances that just don't make it worthwhile to oppose current requirements.

Annie

Annie - some day the laws will change and when they do, I'll be the first one to send you a box of cookies!

I hope everyone doesn't get mad at me for hijacking this thread temporarily, but DH and I were arguing over this just the other day: I thought that medical pot didn't get you high. He said it does. My sister said if it didn't, why are so many trying to get a script for it at the Dr's office she works in. So I figure you might know the answer. I haven't smoked dope since the early '70's so I'm clueless about it all now.

I'm no expert, but I do know that application has something to do with it. The salve I make is, of course, not ingested and does not make DH high. Also, sativa and indica (2 types) have different effects. Indica will give you more of a high than sativa. I'm sure Ricky will have a better explanation.

Cannabis contains many different chemicals. THC is the chemical that gets you high, CBD is one of the chemicals that has the most medical benefit. Both of these can be found in medical cannabis - some with just one, some with both, depending on the application.

In terms of cancer treatment and chemotherapy in specific, THC is the more useful of the two because of several effects. First, it induces an appetite. One of the first things that happens with most chemo is a loss of appetite because the taste buds are dulled and everything tends to get a metallic taste due to cisplatin (one of the chemo drugs.) The other effect is relaxation. Cancer causes anxiety. Chemo makes that anxiety much worse. THC relaxes the patient and relieves much of the anxiety. The old adage "stress kills" is real life. Cancer is stress to the nth degree. Relieving that stress may be the difference between successful treatment and failure.

For other medical problems, the amount of each of the chemicals in cannabis determines what it's effects on the human body will be. Seizures require more CBD. PTSD requires more THC. And so on. I'm not a doctor, although I was a paramedic for almost a dozen years and, having lost a wife to cancer and battling my own cancer, I've spent hundreds of hours pouring through medical research that relates to cannabis and cancer. So, I'm not an expert, but I've got a good feel for what works.

rita, my research on it shows that Ricky is right, at least for seizures. It's the CBD in the edibles that help with the suppression of seizure activity. The THC is what makes you "stoned", not the CBD. So edibles that children can consume to help control seizures do not make the children "high", as they have little or no THC. In fact, CBD oil IS available in Michigan, my ex got some through his health food store. It doesn't seem to have any beneficial effect on my Grandson's seizures, though. Fortunately, his new medication seems to be working, but the problem with anti-seizure medications is that they are central nerve system depressants and cause things like tiredness, dizzyness and "brain fog", making it hard to work and hard to think, either at a job or at school. CBD doesn't have those side effects, so I wish there were a way to try the edibles in place of the commercially available oil, and see if that helped.

Annie

Annie - I was baking for a Parkinson's patient up until he passed away several months ago. His shakes had gotten so bad that he had to give up his driver's license. After a couple of months of "cookie therapy" his shakes were gone and he got his license back, after taking a mandatory test and paying MASSIVE insurance fees. He drove home from the doctor's office on the day before he died. I don't think that just CBD alone is going to stop every form of seizure. I know that THC alone probably won't either. It's going to be a combination of the two at some point that will solve the problem, but then we're back to dealing with the law. Feh.

Ricky, you said: THC is the more useful of the two because of several effects. First, it induces an appetite. One of the first things that happens with most chemo is a loss of appetite because the taste buds are dulled......

Hmm... maybe what they need is some hot BBQ made by the guy who made the best BBQ in the state basted in some um butter. And cookies too.

Chas - it's not that they're dulled so much as everything tastes metallic and you just don't want to eat. My late wife ate both barbecue and jerk sauce during treatment and she said they both tasted like tin foil.

OK, I was confused by what they kept saying on the news.

I read something a couple of decades ago about a chemist who was trying to make foods that would appeal to chemo patients. She was making things that people without the skewed sense of taste wouldn't like, but would taste okay rather than like metal, etc., to the patients. I don't know if that kind of stuff is still around. I think each recipe was tailored to each individual, so it might just be too labor intensive, especially since it's something that couldn't be shared with the family. The cookies seem like a much better idea if it helps them eat regular food.

Were the chips mixed in? Or were they meant to sink in?

Were the chips mixed in? Or were they meant to sink in?

I thought they were, but apparently they weren't. I'm going with the mini chips for the next batch.

LOL!! You thought they were which? (Process of deduction says mixed.) I think it's interesting that they were pushed to the surface!

The dough was too dry and I mixed the chips in by hand. Solving both problems next week with more butter and smaller chips.