Rather than tell you how to make a cake or cookies with cannabis ( go look up the recipe!), this section is dedicated to the theory of how to use cannabis successfully in any recipe that requires butter. Important points to remember when cooking with cannabis are that you need to ensure an even spread of cannabis throughout the chosen dish and that the meal or item produced should not be too heavy. If you have a full stomach then the cannabis constituents will take longer to enter the bloodstream, this is not to say that eating raw hash is better. By making for instance biscuits your stomach will produce bile when you eat, which will assist in the digestion of THC. Another point is to avoid using recipes with excessive sugar as this may slow down or dilute the effects.

The basic principal in cooking with cannabis is to first extract the THC into a fat, for example butter, or an oil. If you live near an Asian community, you can do even better by using ghee (clarified butter) which is widely used in Asian cookery. Because ghee has been clarified, had all the impurities taken out, it tends to become very hot when liquefied, so be very careful when melting it!

Prepare the cannabis as if you were rolling a joint. this will take a long time, especially with 1/2 ounce or more. The pieces should be as small as possible, if you are using herbal cannabis then rub it down into a fine powder. Next, weigh your prepared cannabis and note how much there is. A ratio of 1 ounce (28 g) to 1 lb (450-500 g) of ghee is recommended. Working with this ratio a recipe requiring 125 g would contain about 7 g (1/4 ounce) of cannabis. Measure out the correct amount of ghee for your supply of cannabis and begin to heat. Once the ghee has melted turn down the heat so that the oil is not burning or cooling off.. Sprinkle in your crumbled cannabis and stir gently. It is up to you how long you heat the mixture, stirring occasionally, to ensure the THC fully dissolves, but around an hour is a good guide. When your ghee is cooked, place a clean cloth in a sieve and drain the (very hot!) mixture into a pan or bowl and leave to cool.

If you're using herbal cannabis you may find that a lot of cannabis enriched ghee remains on the leaf matter. most of this can be recouped by placing the plant matter and cloth in a pan. Cover them with clean water and bring to the boil, then simmer for 20 minutes. Carefully retrieve the (hot) cloth and use it to reline the sieve. Put the sieve over a second bowl and strain the leaf/ghee/water mixture through it. The THC rich ghee will form a suspension in the water and will flow through the sieve into the bowl. Finish by rinsing the sieve with some boiling water. Put the bowl aside and allow to cool for a few hours, as it does so the oil comes out of suspension gathers at the surface and solidifies near the edge., allowing you to pour off the water. This operation can recover up to a 1/3 of your ghee so it is well worth going to the trouble.

The ghee, or sacred ghee as the Hindus call it, can now be used in any recipe calling for marg or butter (cookies and cakes are a favourite). If you want to cut down on the strength use part ghee part normal butter. Remember once swallowed the cannabis is in your body and impossible to remove pleasantly! So controlling the dosage is not as easy as with smoking, novice chefs are strongly recommended to start using less cannabis or eat smaller pieces. Bear in mind that the effects of cannabis through ingestion might not even start for over an hour and not peak for several hours later still. Eating cannabis can result in you taking much higher dosages than you would through smoking, so be responsible!