The short answer
You make cannabis cookies by decarboxylating ground flower, infusing it into butter, then swapping that cannabutter into a standard drop cookie recipe. The baking is the easy part. The dosing is not. Butter made at home can land anywhere from 3 mg to 40 mg of THC per cookie, and the two taste identical. So this cannabutter cookie recipe is built around a target dose you decide before you cream the butter.
What you need
- 7 to 14 g decarbed cannabis flower, or a store-bought infused butter with a stated potency
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
- 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp salt
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar and 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 2 large eggs and 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 cups chocolate chips
- 1 to 2 tsp sunflower lecithin, optional but it helps the THC spread evenly through the batch
Step 1: Decarb first, always
Raw flower holds THCA, which isn't psychoactive. Heat converts it. Spread coarsely ground flower in a single layer on a parchment-lined sheet and bake at 240 degrees F for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring once halfway. You want a dry, lightly toasted texture and a smell like roasted herbs. Skip this step and your cookies will be weak no matter how much flower you used.
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Step 2: Infuse the butter
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat with 1 cup of water. Add the decarbed flower and the lecithin, hold it between 160 and 200 degrees F, and let it steep for 2 to 3 hours. Stir now and then. Don't let it boil and don't walk away from it. Strain through cheesecloth or a fine mesh bag, squeeze the solids, then chill the liquid. The butter hardens on top and the murky water underneath gets poured off and tossed. That water is pulling out chlorophyll and plant grit, and getting rid of it makes a cleaner-tasting cookie.
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Step 3: Do the dose math before you bake
Rough estimate: 1 gram of flower labeled 20% THC contains about 200 mg of THC. Decarbing and infusing usually recovers 60% to 80% of that, so call it 120 to 160 mg per gram that actually reaches the butter. Multiply by your grams, then divide by the number of cookies. Twelve grams at 20% is roughly 1,500 to 1,900 mg across a 48-cookie batch, which is 30 to 40 mg each. That's three to four times a standard serving.
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If you're new to edibles, aim for 2.5 to 5 mg per cookie. It's easier to double the recipe later than to guess your way down from a strong batch.
Baking tips that matter
Drop cookies bake at 350 to 375 degrees F, and that's fine. The internal temperature of the dough stays near the boiling point of water until it sets, so the THC isn't cooking off in 10 minutes. What hurts potency is a long, dry bake or leaving the tray in until the edges go dark.
Chill the dough for at least an hour before scooping. Cannabutter softens faster than regular butter at room temperature, and cold dough spreads less. Use a consistent scoop, like a #40 for small cookies, so every cookie lands in the same dose range. Bake one test cookie first and check how it spreads.
What to buy at the dispensary
If you'd rather skip the infusion, most stores sell ready-made cannabutter, infused baking oil, or lab-tested edibles you can use as a benchmark for what 5 mg or 10 mg feels like. Ask the budtender for the lab report or the package total THC and milligrams per serving. That number is the one thing a home cook can't produce alone, and it's worth paying for. Buying flower instead? Ask for a strain with a stated THC percentage, since that's the input to your math.
Onset, dose, and storage
Edibles don't hit like a vape. Expect 30 minutes to 2 hours before you feel anything, a peak around 3 hours, and effects that can run 4 to 8 hours, longer than inhaled cannabis. The classic mistake is eating a second cookie at the 45-minute mark because nothing seems to be happening.
Store cooled cookies in an airtight container in the fridge for about a week, or freeze them for up to 3 months. Keep them away from kids and pets, and label the container with the date and your estimated mg per cookie. Homemade edibles look exactly like ordinary cookies, and that's how accidental ingestions happen.