When your job is to make baked goods, the last thing you want is for them to go stale. Same with marijuana edibles. How do you keep your infused cakes, cookies and other treats from drying out before they’re sold?
Kimberly Valdez is the pastry chef at MB Steak at the Hard Rock in Vegas, and also oversees the edibles at Acres Cannabis. She’s found a way to keep the integrity of her baked goods. “It’s a challenge,” she tells Food & Wine. “You need to create a good pastry while maintaining a note of marijuana.”
Since it takes five days for edibles to get the “green light” for retail sale, she has figured out that the best way to keep her pastries fresh in the interim is to add the cannabis to the icings, frosting, and ganaches, which keep well for a longer period of time when refrigerated or frozen. By not infusing the actually pastries themselves, they can be made day-of, ensuring their freshness upon purchase.
“I want the pastries to be the vessels while glaze and frosting and ganache serve as the carriers for cannabis,” says Valdez, who will be diving into more sophisticated desserts this month. She’ll be turning out haute chocolate domes filled with infused peanut butter, blackout cake with a THC white-cream center, and lemon cake with cream cheese frosting made with canna-butter.
Valdez, who admits she’s gotten accidentally stoned while taste-testing her creations, says she takes a lot of pride in the pastry program at Acres and that “I know people who use marijuana medically and now they don’t have to gnaw on nasty edibles. They can enjoy cookies and donuts that are freshly baked. That makes me happy.”
