Cheese Wiz Meets Its Match: Spray Cake

The award for best invention at Harvard since Facebook goes John M.A. McCallum ’16 and Brooke K. Nowakowski ’16, who released Spray Cake, a cake batter ready to be baked straight out of an aerosol can, at the Harvard i-Lab early this year.

Like many undergraduates trying to maneuver through the general education requirements, McCallum and Nowakowski, Social Studies and East Asian Studies concentrators respectively, took the famous Science of Cooking, also known as Science of the Physical Universe 27.

For their final class project, the pair hatched what they thought was an obvious idea—using whip cream technology to manufacture and sell cake batter in a can.

“Honestly, we were kind of shocked it hadn’t been done before,” Nowakowski told WBZ-TV in an interview.

In one of the boldest claims of all time, Nowakowski said that Spray Cake will help their clientele consume less, as the invention allows bakers to make the proportion they want without baking an entire cake, which is all too tempting. Then again, what’s more tempting than a cake in a can that you just toss into the microwave?

With 7 billion people in the world, we all bear some collective responsibility for dropping the ball on this one.

Falling into the category of things in your life that you never knew you needed, and perfectly marketed for the ever expanding ‘people whose cooking skills are limited to the microwave’ demographic, this invention has the convenience and novelty that has already caught national attention, including coverage in The Boston Globe and TIME.

Move over Stanford, Harvard is coming for your throne atop the startup world. With Facebook and Spray Cake, Harvard may not be the most prolific incubator of startups, but with these two world-changing inventions, Harvard is making an impact.

—Staff writer Ivan B. K. Levingston can be reached at Ivan.Levingston@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @IvanLevingston.

—Staff writer Tyler S. Olkowski can be reached at tyler.olkowski@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @OlkowskiTyler.