SprayCake makes ‘cake in a can’ a tasty reality

Two Harvard students are about to revolutionize the way we make cake with their brilliant patent-pending invention: SprayCake.

Gone are the days of craving a cupcake at midnight but being too lazy to whip one up from scratch.

With SprayCake, you can simply spray one out of a can.

Think whipped cream in a can — but with organic cake batter.

TIME's Tessa Berenson explains how it works:

"The accelerant in the can releases air bubbles inside the batter, eliminating the need for baking soda and baking powder so the confection is ready to eat almost instantly. It takes 30 seconds to bake a cupcake in the microwave, and only one minute to bake a full cake."

John McCallum, a Harvard junior, came up with the idea for his final project in a Science and Cooking class.

"We had a final required with the course," McCallum tells ABC News, "and we wanted an excuse to eat a lot of cake. Spray Cake is the excuse I came up with."

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Fellow classmate and now-girlfriend Brooke Nowakowski immediately saw the SprayCake's potential.

"He was just like, 'Cool. Lab project,'" Nowakowski tells the Boston Globe. "But I thought it could go somewhere."

McCallum and Nowakowski teams up and enrolled in a course called Startup R&D last semester where they further developed their SprayCake idea. They ultimately were awarded $10,000 at the 2014 Harvard College Innovation Challenge.

One huge selling point is portion control:

"You can simply pull it off the shelf, make one cupcake, then put it back in the fridge and it won’t go bad," Nowakowski says.

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One question remains: aside from the novelty of literally spraying a cake into existence, does it taste any good?

McCallum and Nowakowski insist it does.

"I love it," McCallum tells ABC News. "Though there is an argument over which flavour is better, I prefer vanilla but Brooke prefers chocolate, which is fair."

They perfected the recipe in McCallum's dorm kitchen — and recently got the thumbs up from a notable baker, Joanne Chang of Flour bakeries.

"We want the batter to be organic and kosher certified," says McCallum. "We want fresh cake batter, not some overly processed food."

So far, the SprayCake sounds considerably less scary than the very processed and too-orange Easy Cheese — and more practical than edible spray paint.

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McCallum and Nowakowski insist they're not a threat to the art of cake baking — they can't compete with the satisfaction of baking something from scratch — but instead are targeting consumers of pre-made cake mixes.

Tiffany MacIsaac, James Beard Award semi-finalist and owner of Buttercream Bakeshop in Washington, D.C., is supportive of the concept.

"People tend to steer clear of dessert because it’s not a necessity," MacIsaac writes in a email to Yahoo! Food editor Rachel Tepper. "If this gets people in their kitchen baking at home, then that’s just a step away from scratch-baked. So I’m a fan."

Would you try SprayCake?