Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Quick & Easy Guide: How to make Cannabis Chocolate - Cannabis Edible Recipe




How to Make Homemade Cannabis Chocolate Edibles

This is a quick and easy recipe for making delicious cannabis chocolate bars. The recipe includes only 5 ingredients, and also is completed in just 5 simple steps. And really takes between 1-2 hours start to finish.




What Ingredients you will need:
  • 1/4 cup cannabis coconut oil (~50 grams)
  • 1/4 cup cacao powder
  • 1 and 1/2 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 1 and 1/2 tablespoons honey
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
optional ingredients:
  • nuts
  • fruits & berries (dried or fresh)
  • peanut butter
  • pieces of chocolate
What Supplies you will need:
  • measuring cups and spoons (cup, 1/4 cup, 1/2 teaspoon, 1/2 tablespoon)
  • fork or spoon
  • spatula
  • digital scale
  • pyrex bowl
  • frying pan or flat bottomed pan
  • oven mitten
  • 24 oz (710mL) tupperware
optional items:
  • parchment paper
  • whisk
Total time: ~ 45 - 120 minutes 
  • depends on how long the chocolate bar is allowed to cool during step 5
So, lets start making some homemade cannabis chocolate bars

Step 1: Measuring

Start by measuring and adding each of the ingredients (cacao powder, cannabis coconut oil, maple syrup, honey, vanilla extract) into the pyrex bowl.

We recommend using a scale for measuring out the cannabis coconut oil. It is a great tool for determining approximate strength of your edibles.

See determining strength & potency below for more information.


Step 2: Heating & Mixing

Once all of the ingredients are in the pyrex bowl. Heat a frying pan on medium heat and add water into the pan. Place the pyrex bowl into the frying pan. You want a decent amount of water to be in the frying pan at all times. However not enough so that it will overflow once the water comes to a full boil. Depending on the heat setting, you may need to reapply water to the pan during this step.

Remember to only use glassware that is heat tempered such as pyrex glass. If you are not sure, use a smaller sauce pan instead of the glass bowl. As long as water can boil between them it will work fine.

Using a spoon or fork or whisk, begin to mix the ingredients. The cannabis coconut oil and other liquids will begin to turn the cacao powder into a gel. Continue to stir vigorously throughout this process.

Should the mixture be overly soupy or oily, add more cacao powder in small amounts.
Should the mixture be too crumbly and dry add more regular coconut oil (non-cannabis).

Most importantly, be aware of the temperature, as you do not want to burn the chocolate. You are simply trying to melt all of the ingredients evenly.


Step 3: Pouring the Cannabis Chocolate

Once all of the ingredients have dissolved, you are ready to pour the cannabis chocolate into your tupperware container. Turn off the stove and using the oven mittens and a spatula, carefully pour into the tupperware. The spatula will help you retrieve all that was in the pyrex bowl and also level out the bar.

Be careful here as the bowl will still be quite hot to the touch.

Avoid spilling the chocolate on the upper part of the tupperware as it will not be part of the finished molding at the bottom.


Step 4: Freezing the Cannabis Chocolate Bar

Depending on how cold your fridge / freezer is, this step can take around 30-60 minutes. If you are not in a rush to make use of your homemade cannabis chocolate edible it can stay in the freezer for months.









Step 5: Scoring the Cannabis Chocolate Bar for Proper Dosing

This is actually one of the most crucial steps in this process, aside from standard safety while cooking. Once the bar has had time to harden you need to score the bar into even parts.

This is really important so that you and everyone who enjoys this bar knows approximately how much they are ingesting. For reference I tend to break it down into 20 or 25 equal pieces.

It is always possible to eat more should you realize the dosing is too weak for your needs. Please be careful and do not overdose yourself or others.

Determining Strength and Potency of your Cannabis Chocolate Edible

Say you use 1 oz of cannabis flower to make a pound of coconut butter. That means you should be 1oz of cannabis distributed throughout that 1 lb of canna coco oil.

This recipe uses 50g of canna coco oil. Which is approximately 1/10th of that 1 lb of oil. So you can assume the entire cannabis chocolate bar will then contain approximately 1/10th of an ounce of cannabis or roughly 2.8 grams

And by breaking the bar into equal parts, let's say 4 parts, you then can predict the approximate strength from what it started at. In this example each piece of the bar would contain around 0.7 grams of active cannabis oil.

Everyone responds to edibles differently. So until you know your own tolerance, start with smaller doses.

Additional Notes
  • Long-term Storage: the 24oz tupperware is a cost effective method for creating the chocolate molds, and using the recipe above you can also fit 4 bars into a single tupperware. In the freezer these bars can last for at least 6 months.
  • When using Fruit & Berries: keep in mind that fruit and berries can reduce the shelf-life of your chocolate edibles. They should be always refrigerated, and consumed in no more than 1-2 weeks. Freeze your cannabis chocolate bar for longer storage.




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Happy Growing!!!
MM's

Thursday, November 15, 2018

2018 Outdoor Cannabis Grow Harvesting Day

2018 Outdoor Cannabis Grow
Week: Forget the week...Today we are harvesting
Strain: Super Silver Haze

Last plant to be chopped down. Wanted to put together a quick video to pay homage to all three of them. It was quite the journey this summer and fall. That actually started way way back in early winter of 2018. When all three of these plants were selected from a cloning rig. They were the lucky ladies out of a group of ten cuttings.

All three of these plants had a slow start because of the cold temps through the spring and summer. But all of them took off once the temperatures started remaining above 70 degrees. And turned into giants that just didn't want to flip into flower mode.



They didn't need a lot of care and support during the vegetative stage. SSH strain grew tall during this stage and the stems were plenty thick to support them reaching heights of 13 feet. It didn't hurt that the summer saw very few high wind occurrences.

During this period we didn't need to provide them with any nutrients. Our soil was pre-mixed store bought 55 cubic liters and we then mixed it up with coco coir that was left over from our indoor grow.

We felt this was needed to help stimulate the root growth and allow oxygen to get and the excess water to flow out of the medium without pooling.


Although it was fun, it wasn't all happiness and orange sunshine. 

We learned pretty early into August that these ladies were going to need either a meteorological miracle where weather remained mild and dry through October and maybe into November. Other option would be to physically manipulate the plants light cycle.

Unfortunately due to the heights of these plants any kind of tent or cover was going to be impossible for us.

So we were left with the natural option and had a wild ride watching the weather get progressively worse over the next 2.5 months. September went by without any major issues, and for the most part October's temperature didn't drop too much. But the constant humidity in the fall months was severely damaging to the bud development.

Some weeks the temperature was hovering in the 60's but it was either raining all day and on the off days the humidity was still >75%. That promoted a bud rot to form on all of our plants. And try and we might to remove the diseased sections, it wasn't always successful.


Given our experience with just three outdoor plants. We gained a new respect for any groups that professionally run farms out in the other legal states.

We also didn't use any pesticides this year. Another factor that promoted bud rot was the caterpillars we didn't realize were in our buds until harvest time.

Yeah Bub. I'm talking to you and all your friends. Next year it's on, like Donkey Kong.

Fun fact as we were trimming the leaves off the buds. This one caterpillar had an aphid riding on it's back. The aphid is just out of focus in the back but you can see it's body outline.


So this may sound like the grow was a total loss, but that's not true. We had pests, rot and harvested all three of the plants well before full bud development. And all of these facts are not ideal.

But we did learn a lot, and now know true sativa strains like SSH will need help converting over to flowering to make go full term before the season ends in New England.

And we have a lot of bud to work into oils, concentrates and edibles.

I have to say we are still perfecting our skills at the Ice Water Hash Bubble Bags. Our first run was good, but all other runs have not yielded anything great.


Here is a photo of some scissor trimming and finger hash formed into a little ball. Although it's small this was the first time i've been able to get nearly all of it all my fingers. Usually I would just scrub that stuff off and accept the loss. Again just another example of the small victories from this grow season.


This shot is really poorly focused and I don't have the caterpillars in the shot. But I took the photo because they would slowly start climbing the bag, even reaching the top after a little while. 

Kind of felt like I was playing a caterpillar version of Tempest. Where I would need to knock them back down to the bottom or they would escape into the house and I'd be in trouble.

We have a ton of the pre-developed popcorn buds. If you can call them that. :(


Now all we have outside is around 100 gallons of soil and stems and roots which will be composted and spread around the gardens. Lots of experience gained this year, and a new approach to the 2019 grow season.


So that's where I left those pink flamingos... 


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Happy Growing!!!
MM's


Friday, November 9, 2018

2018 Outdoor Cannabis Grow - Week 11 of Flowering

2018 Outdoor Cannabis Grow
Week: 11 of Flowering
Strain: Super Silver Haze

Well we did it! We were able to get one of the three Super Silver Haze plants to get nearly through the flowering stage. There were a lot of doubters out there. And a couple of times it really looked doubtful that these plants were could go the distance. But hey to poorly paraphrase MeatLoaf, "1 out of 3 ain't bad". And that's basically how we feel. 👏🙏


So we are seeing that this plant ended up having the slowest development during the flowering stage. It also had the least bud rot. Which could have been due to the fact that it was the farthest away from other plants and bushes.


The top colas were looking pretty ripe. And with the incoming weather bringing frost warnings and rain it seemed like a good time to harvest.

As you can see below even some of the top colas weren't fully ready for harvest. Oh well. There is always next year. And we'll have plenty of product from this season to convert into hash and canna-coconut oil for edibles.

We're definitely going to be testing our baking abilities this holiday season. 🍪🍫🍬


So of the plant really started showing a lot of purples.

According to WikiLeaf and other sources on the interwebs. Purple is unfortunately not indicative of a higher potency. But this could be due to genetics or the environment was optimal.

In our case it was almost certainly environmental. By that we mean the plants were allowed to flower in cold temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Under these conditions the chlorophyll in the leaves started to break down and another compound called, anthocyanin starts showing through as the concentration overtakes that of the chlorophyll. As you can guess this compounds color is purple.


The purple buds also stood out with these thick orange pistils (see below). The buds were ultimately not ripe and were not as filled out as we would have liked them to be by week 11. It was probably due to the cold, rain and end of the growing season weak sunshine.


We are very excited to try out these purple buds though. Our indoor grows haven't yielded any of these so this is a first.

From our research Super Silver Haze lineage is primed for purple buds. Northern Lights is a strain known to contain large amounts of anthocyanin.

Anyways this was a fun run. After this post we're transitioning into harvesting posts / videos. And then edible creations.

If you have any suggestions for edibles we would love to hear them and get any special recipes.


Thanks for reading, please leave a comment or check us out at:

YouTube <--- please subscribe to our channel!!!

Happy Growing!!!
MM's