Wake + Bake Cannasugar Recipe

When we polled the folks on the Wake + Bake Instagram and asked what they wanted to see next, this Cannabis Sugar recipe (a.k.a. Cannasugar) won by a landslide.

On that note, feel free to follow me on IG for quick recipes, cannabis book reviews, healthy cannabis tips, and to join in future recipe votes.

I first experimented with making a cannabis sugar recipe back in 2020, right before I made the move from thickly humid Arkansas back to bone dry Colorado. 

My first cannasugar recipe followed the slow method (see below) with coconut sugar. It took several days of tincturing and several days of drying, and it made my kitchen smell like a bar as the alcohol evaporated. 

I’ll be honest. The slow method for making cannasugar in a humid environment wasn’t my jam. So when the community nudged me in that direction, I was a real post-christmas grinch about it. 

But earlier this week, we were at a staff meeting for the Cannabis Coaching Institute, and Michelle Crawford – of CannaCurious Coaching mentioned to me that there was a non-flammable way for me to speed up the process. 

She shared a simple and fast method that didn’t involve a fan blowing booze fumes around my little house; one that didn’t take weeks to make; one that changed my mind about cannasugar forever.

I went to work making my next batch of cannabis sugar and it has quickly become one of my favorite cannabis products. 

A 1/2 teaspoon using the dosage math below yields me a sweet little 3-4mg microdose of THC, CBD and CBG that I can sprinkle on my breakfast, on snacks, and dissolve in beverages.

I just started playing with the end product of this quick and easy cannasugar recipe, but I’m already starting to see that the possibilities are endless. 

I did make this recipe years ago, but this new version changed all my grinch vibes about it and I’m a new convert. 

And maybe it’s not because the process was so slow that I wasn’t really into it, but because I didn’t get to use my first batch of cannasugar. I never got the chance to experiment with it to see how awesome and versatile it truly is. 

See… when it was finally done, I gave it to my favorite neighbor before I moved away.

Yep. I gave my neighbor a cup of cannasugar. And now you can too! 

(Whew! Took a while to get that cup of sugar/neighbor connection, eh? Now that we scratched that itch, let’s move on 😉)

What’s Cannabis Sugar Good For?

Cannasugar is a great base for making quick edibles or incorporating cannabis into edibles recipes that don’t have any fat. 

While fat can help with absorption – making edibles last longer and feel stronger – sometimes that’s not the desired effect. Fat-based infusions are also tough to incorporate in things like drinks, candies, and weed gummies. 

What’s great about cannabis sugar is that it allows you to evaporate the alcohol of a tincture and put your cannabinoids in a different medium. 

For folks who are bothered by the flavor of cannabis in edibles recipes, this is one way to make the flavor more palatable.

Cannasguar for Making Quick, Custom Dose Edibles

I’ve fallen in love with turning my meals into microdose edibles throughout the day.

In my experience it’s one of the best ways to ingest cannabis, without all the hubbub of making edibles. It allows you to feel for what you actually need and change it up throughout the day.

If you want a 2 mg edible in the morning, you use some cannabis infused coconut oil to turn your toast into a 2mg edible. If you want a ten mg edible, add some cannabis tincture and your evening tea becomes 10mg edible. 

I have three businesses now (it was two, but I just opened an indie bookstore 🤓📚 ). I’m also the solo parent of a 6 year old, so for me, turning my meals into edibles is so much easier and more fun than planning out large batches and remembering to take them throughout the day.

I’ve been dropping oil infusions on my recipes for years, but this cannasugar recipe took things to a whole new level.

The moment this cannasugar was done, it was snack time, so I made this:

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A post shared by Corinne Tobias (@corinnetobias_)

Aside from being the secret ingredient in 5 Minute Cannasugar Cinnamon Raisin Toast, you use cannasugar in tea or coffee without adding the alcohol taste of a tincture or the oil slick of an infusion floating on top of your warm beverage.

You can also coat the rims of glasses to make cannabis cocktails or add it to any of your favorite baked goods. 

Anything you can do with sugar, you can do it with cannasugar.

How to Make Cannasugar

The first thing you need to make cannasugar is an alcohol based tincture. 

Before you ask, the answer is no. You can’t sub an alcohol based tincture out for an MCT “tincture” or any other fat-based infusion because you need the alcohol to evaporate while leaving your cannabinoids mingled in the sugar.

There are a few different ways to make a cannabis tincture, but my favorite (and the fastest) is a freezer tincture – a.k.a. The Ice Dragon. This tincture takes about 15 minutes of hands-on time and an overnight stint for your cannabis and alcohol in the freezer. 

Ardent Cannabis did some testing and found that using the freezer tincture method saves you weeks and improves flavor, but does result in a small reduction in cannabinoids over doing a long steep tincture.

Long steep tinctures have historically taken days, weeks, or months, but lab tests are showing us that they may not be necessary.

The recipe below is a fast alternative to the way most tutorials will show you how to make cannasugar.

Cannabis Sugar Recipe: The Slow Method

If you don’t have a crockpot or don’t want to use heat (if you’re trying to make a THCa, CBDa or CBGa cannasugar), you can combine your tincture and sugar and spread it out on a pan lined with parchment paper. 

Stir occasionally and the cannabis sugar should be ready in a couple of days.

I tried the slow method first using coconut sugar in Arkansas during the rainy season and it took a LONG time to dry because of the humidity. It worked, but it was pretty stinky and took several days (so many I lost count). I much prefer the method below. 

How long does it take to make this cannasugar recipe?

The quick cannasugar recipe below was ready in under 8 hours. That’s about how long it took for the alcohol to evaporate off and leave the cannasugar completely dry.

If you make it using the Ice Dragon Tincture recipe, you could do the whole process from flower to tincture to infused sugar in less than a day.

This may sound like a long time, but for the most part, you’re not doing much hands-on work. You’re just giving everything time to do the work for you.

And all that time is worth it. If you make this in bulk, you could make hundreds of doses in one go and save hundreds of dollars over buying dispensary edibles that are full of nastier stuff than sugar. 

What do you need to make cannasugar?

All you need for this cannabis sugar recipe is:

1. An Alcohol-Based Cannabis Tincture
2. Sugar (preferably organic and fair trade)

Yep. That’s it. 

If you’d like to use the quick recipe below, you’ll also need a crockpot or a way to heat your cannabis sugar that is safe.

Since there’s alcohol involved, please leave out the open flames, stovetops and gas ovens. 

For the slow method above, you just need a baking sheet or any other flat surface and some parchment paper. 

Coconut Cannabis Sugar Recipe

For those of you avoiding cane sugar, Coconut sugar can be substituted for sugar in a 1:1 ratio. I like this one.

Other folks have said sweetener alternatives work, but these days I stick to stuff my great-grandma ate, so I’ve never tried infusing those. If you do, let us know in the comments below!

Cannasugar Dosage Math

Before we go any further, we need to cover dosage math. Please, please, do your dosage math before you make this recipe.

I understand if you’re math resistant or math challenged (me too!) but getting comfortable with this skill will make your edibles so much more consistent and so much easier to share with those you love (without them having a bad experience).

It will also help you as you continue to make custom blends for your edibles recipes and cannabis products by allowing you to tweak the amount of CBD, THC and CBG in your recipes to find ratios you love.

When you sign up for my free edibles dosage calculator, I’ll also send you a quick video walking you through the calculator [it’s free]. You’ll also get a sweet deal on my Cannabis Cooking Masterclass if you want to go deeper. 

For this recipe, I used my dosage calculator on a mission to make my cannabis sugar doses small and mighty. I didn’t want to have to make things super sweet just to get a microdose, so I plugged in the numbers from my tincture and then adjusted my dosage using the servings section until I got the perfect dose for me. I figured if half a teaspoon of sugar ended up at about 3.5mg that would be perfect to sprinkle on my snacks or add to a cup of tea without my teeth falling right out. 

Everyone is different, so play with the dosage calculator until you get a dose and ratio that works for you.

Speaking of ratios, I used ⅓ cup of a 1:1:1 tincture that was steeped in alcohol from my local distillery. That just means I had an equal ratio of CBD:THC:CBG in my tincture. The CBG (12%) was almost half the potency of my THC (approx 20%) and CBD (tested at 23%),  so I had to double the CBG flower to match the potency of the other two. 

To make my balanced ratio tinctures, I use CBD and CBG flower from Sacred Smoke Herbals (my go-to for organic CBD and CBG plant material and pre-rolls in the US). If you’re looking for a high quality source of CBD and CBG flower delivered to your doorstep, you can use the code WAKEANDBAKE for 15% off your order.

If you’re just looking to make THC cannasugar, you can keep this simple and start with that cannabinoid or you can dive in and add CBD and/or CBG to your flower.

Here’s a look at how my numbers worked out when I made this recipe [note: I round my numbers to make the math more even… this isn’t exact science for me, I’m just getting in the ballpark]:

The dosage calculator makes it easy to fiddle with the numbers until I get the dose I want before I even step in the kitchen. This has saved me countless kitchen fails, weak batches, and overly strong doses. Highly recommended.

Quick Cannabis Sugar Recipe

This is the fastest way I can think of making cannasugar. It’s what my 6 year old would call “cheetah fast” (which is what she calls it when she moves her arms like she’s running really fast, but somehow the rest of her body moves in slow motion).

Ingredients

• 1 Cup Organic Cane Sugar or Coconut Sugar
• ⅓ Cup Tincture – adjust for desired dosage using the dosage calculator

Method

1. In a crockpot on the lowest heat setting* (on my crockpot the warm setting did the trick):
2. Stir together sugar and cannabis tincture until combined
3. Stir regularly, checking to make sure the sugar mixture isn’t getting too ho
4. Keep stirring occasionally until your sugar is completely dry and looks like sugar again. If it is chunky, you can break it up using a fork or potato masher.
5. Store your cannasugar in an airtight container. I put mine in salve tins to give out as gifts and to my family and neighbors.

*make sure to keep the lid off so the alcohol can evaporate. If you’ve never done this before, keep a very close eye on your mixture so it doesn’t get too hot. Crockpots all operate at different temperatures, so stick around and make sure yours doesn’t scorch the cannasugar mixture. When in doubt use the slow recipe listed above.  

And voila! I can’t wait to keep experimenting with all of the things cannasugar can be used for. Now it’s your turn! Let me know in the comments below if you made this, how you use cannasugar, and what you’d like to see me make next. 

With love,

Corinne