A star pastry chef explains how to have your ice cream and get high too. Considering the end goal, making marijuana edible can be a comically precise process, often entrusted to industrious professionals or abandoned midway by stoned hobbyists. Pastry chef Katy Peetz, formerly of Roberta’s in Brooklyn, has developed a polished recipe for giggle-inducing, weed-infused ice cream. Her method requires a home ice cream machine and some patience. But if you don’t want to bother with those, you can still enjoy her done-in-no-time weed cream. For a quick slushy treat, Peetz recommends mixing the weed cream with coconut milk, pouring that over shaved ice and adding berries or slices of frozen banana. The dessert’s potency is up to you—stick with five grams of weed to keep it light.

Weed Cream
Yield:

• 1 ½ cups
• 2 cups heavy cream
  5-10 grams marijuana, broken up

Combine the heavy cream and marijuana in a medium saucepan. Cook just below a simmer for one hour. Strain through cheesecloth or fine mesh. Pour the infused cream into a mixing bowl. If too much has evaporated, add some non-infused cream until you’ve got 1 ½ cups. Mix with a hand blender for 30 seconds. Chill until ready to use.

Basic Weed Ice Cream
Yield: about 3 quarts

The following recipe creates a plain, white ice cream base. To add flavor, steep your milk with vanilla or herbs before mixing it with the weed cream. Peetz likes balancing out marijuana’s earthy flavor with a sweet and sour strawberry rhubarb topping, made by cooking the fresh fruit with sugar until the water has evaporated.

• 1 ½ cups weed cream
• 4 cups milk
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 ½ tbsp honey
• ¾ cup dry milk powder
• Scant tsp xanthan gum
• 3 large eggs
• ½ tsp kosher salt

Heat the weed cream and milk to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Turn off the heat, and add the rest of the ingredients except for the eggs and salt. Whisk to dissolve the sugar and milk powder. (The xanthan gum may not dissolve totally. This is okay.) In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs until frothy and temper with a small amount of the hot cream mixture. Pour everything back into the saucepan. Turn the heat back on low and slowly bring the mixture up to 173 degrees, stirring the bottom of the pot often with a rubber spatula. Remove from heat. Add salt. Blend the mixture on a blender’s low setting for one minute. Strain through a fine sieve into a container. Place the container in an ice bath. Let chill completely. Add honey or maple syrup to sweeten. For a bright flavor, add a squeeze of lemon. Spin the liquid mixture in your ice cream machine and serve.

How does weed ice cream work?

Much like other edibles you may have bought or made, cannabis ice cream is just another way to enjoy your weed. Getting a buzz off of ice cream while cooling down on a hot summer’s day just sounds idyllic.

Be careful, though! Like with any edibles, it may be tempting to have a bit too much without realising it, and before you know it, it’s all gone and you’re super high! However, you can always look to store your ice cream in separate, smaller containers as a way of portion control. This way, you won’t get caught up in the deliciousness of it all and keep eating.

But before we get into all of that, there are a few steps you must take before you can enjoy your frozen delicacy.

How to make your own cannabis ice cream

Now that you’ve seen the video, we’ll give you a breakdown of all the ingredients and equipment you need to make this fantastic, ice-cold, indulgent delight. Then, we will go over the process of preparing your weed for consumption, and finally, how to make weed ice cream yourself.

Ingredients

• 5g hash or 10g finely ground bud
• 500ml heavy cream (or vegan equivalent)
• Pinch of salt
• 400g banana
• 75g sugar or alternative sweetener
• 3 tbsp. rum
• 2 tbsp. butter (or vegan equivalent)
• 5 tbsp. honey (or vegan equivalent)

Of course, you are welcome to substitute any of the ingredients mentioned above or simply add others to satisfy your palate (such as nuts, cookies, etc…).

Hardware

For decarboxylation:

• Large sheet pan
• Parchment paper
• Spatula or stirring device

For ice cream:

• Two large saucepans
• Whisk
• Large bowl
• Freezer storage container with lid

Decarboxylation

Before we get into the ice cream instructions, we have to cover one hugely important topic: decarboxylation. Now, don’t worry; this isn’t going to be an in-depth science lesson (this is ice cream after all!), but just a couple of points to cover so you can get the most out of your weed ice cream.

Decarboxylation involves heating weed to the point at which cannabinoid acids turn into activated cannabinoids. At its simplest, decarboxylation ensures your edibles are psychoactive. If the plant matter isn’t “decarbed” first, it will not get you high. Decarboxylation happens automatically when smoking or vaping due to the associated flame or heating element, but decarbing edibles requires some preparation.

There are a couple ways to go about doing this. The first method uses a conventional oven.

1. Preheat your oven to 105–110°C. 
2. Grind up your weed into small pieces, but not a powder. Place it on parchment paper on a baking sheet, and place it all in the oven for 30–45 minutes.
3. Once your weed has turned a light golden brown, you should be good to go. Be sure to give it a stir a couple times as it’s decarbing to heat everything evenly.
4. Once it’s done, allow it to cool a bit so you can handle it, then you can go ahead and start infusing!

Another decarboxylation method is to place your cannabis in vacuum-sealed plastic bags and simply boil them in a pot or pressure cooker for about an hour. Then, you carefully remove the bag with the buds, and voilà—you now have decarboxylated weed, without any of the browning.

Instructions

OK, now that you’ve got everything together and ready, let’s get into it!

1. Pour the cream into a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat.
2. In a second saucepan, place your butter, sugar, and salt on medium heat and stir as they begin to melt.
3. Take your ground, decarboxylated weed and stir it into the saucepan with the butter, sugar, and salt, making sure to evenly distribute the weed.
4. Whisk the warm cream into the butter mixture.
5. Mash up the banana in a large bowl.
6. Once mashed into a paste, add the cream mixture, rum, honey, and any other ingredient you want into the bowl.
7. Mix everything together until the entire mixture has a paste-like consistency.
8. Place the mixture in the freezer for a few hours, until it begins to have a mushy consistency.
9. Take the bowl and pour the mixture into a suitable freezer container.
10. Whisk once again until the mixture is smooth.
11. Place a lid on the container and keep in the freezer until it is firm.

And that’s all there is to the creation of cannabis ice cream. Sound easy? That’s because it is! But if you’re stuck wondering which strain to infuse into your ice cream, have no fear! We’ve got a few suggestions up our sleeves. Read on to find out more.