Baker Chloe Barnes is thrilled to finally open her cannabis cafe, serving food and drinks infused with the medicinal properties of legally grown and sold marijuana. She’s even more thrilled that–despite some mostly emailed resistance from anonymous protesters–her cafe is proving to be a resounding success.

Success gets a bit overwhelming, though, when the annual Azalea Bay Pro Challenger Surf Competition gets underway only a week after her opening day. Chloe’s beachside California town is ordinarily pretty sleepy, but the surfing competition brings in participants from all over the world, making for their busiest tourist season of the year. She is soon run off her feet by all the extra business and quickly hires more help in the front of the cafe even as she worries about hiring another baker to help in the back of the house.

So the last thing she needs is to be involved in another murder mystery. An innocuous evening spent with her friends leads to discovering the dead body of one of the competing surfers, Aaron Gill. His death looks like a deliberate drug overdose, but his roommate and best friend, Ethan Wilson, is vehemently opposed to the idea. Chloe is sympathetic but has no interest in getting involved until her friend Matt–who also happens to be Ethan’s older brother–asks her to look into things.

The last time Chloe “looked into” something like this, she was violently attacked. Sure, she caught the killer who’d been trying to let Chloe’s aunt Dawn take the fall for murder, but that doesn’t mean that she wants to risk bodily harm again. Her innate sense of justice and desire to stand up for those who need it, though, find her deeply involved in investigating a murder once more, regardless of the danger. Will she be able to figure out whodunit before anyone else, herself included, gets hurt?

This second installment of the Cannabis Cafe Mystery series builds wonderfully from the debut, as Chloe, her family, and friends get realistically drawn into yet another investigation while juggling their interesting, off-the-beaten-path lives. Emily George is a big advocate of legal uses of cannabis and makes sure that her writing is as informative as it is entertaining. This extends to talking about another niche interest that’s slowly becoming mainstream; as a card-carrying Dungeon Master myself, I personally appreciated her excellent descriptions of Dungeons & Dragons, what it is, and how to play.

There were three recipes included here for cannabutter, cann-gria, and the following cookie recipe, lightly edited for format and space.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink Cookies

Make with cannabutter to give your cookies a higher purpose, or substitute with regular butter in a 1:1 ratio for cookies the whole family can enjoy.

A note on mix-ins: this is where you can let your creativity go wild! Chloe loves to use chocolate chips, pretzels, walnuts and toffee chips. But try anything you like. Crushed up potato chips for a salty crunch, your favorite breakfast cereal, different types of chocolate chips (like white or dark or semisweet), dried fruit, other types of nuts, sprinkles, M&Ms, chopped up brittle or candy bar, marshmallows… or anything else your heart desires.

Yield: 12-24 depending

Ingredients

2 cups of all-purpose flour

¾ cup softened cannabutter

½ cup packed brown sugar

¼ cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon of high-quality vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups of mix-ins (see note above)

Instructions

Add cannabutter and both types of sugar to a medium-sized bowl and use an electric mixer to beat at medium speed until creamy. Alternatively, you can mix in a stand mixer, if you prefer.

Beat egg and vanilla into butter mixture.

Add dry ingredients (minus mix-ins) to a smaller bowl and stir to combine.

Gradually add dry ingredients into wet ingredients until just combined.

Add mix-ins and stir to combine.

Cover bowl and chill in refrigerator, ideally overnight but at least for a minimum of 3-4 hours.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F/180 degrees C.

Use a cookie scoop or tablespoon to place dough onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper.

Bake for nine minutes and then begin checking for golden exterior. Total bake time will depend on the size of the cookies, but could be up to fourteen minutes.

Remove from oven and cool completely (minimum of twenty minutes.)

I chose to use regular butter for this recipe and ransacked my pantry to see what I could use for the mix-ins, eventually settling on crystallized ginger, flaked coconut, and two different types of chocolate. I actually wound up making smaller cookies than intended–for a change!–and had 33 delectable cookies by the end of the cooling process. It probably helped that my chilled dough was surprisingly hard to shape. I had to use a metal spoon to pull out a chunk that I thought looked about the size of a rounded tablespoon, then roll it in my hands to shape before placing on the cookie sheet. Even at a smaller size, these took 11 minutes to bake and not nine. All ovens vary, of course, so keep an eye on them as they cook.

The results were delicious, though I do recommend eating these warm out of the oven, especially if chocolate is involved. I’m definitely keeping this recipe in mind the next time I have a lot of baking odds and ends left over to use up.

Next week, we travel north and just a smidge east to whip up a delicious sandwich while investigating a strange death in a ski lodge. Do join me!

See also: Cooking the Books: Double Grudge Donuts by Ginger Bolton