Why applesauce is actually a miracle food

Imagine, if you will, that it’s a seasonal February and Chapel Hill just received its latest dusting of allotted snowfall for the season, and since North Carolina is effectively broken with the snowfall, classes are cancelled. #Awesome. 

You went sledding earlier today and fear you may have broken your coccyx, and in order to pass the remainder of the day you feel a desperate inclination to bake a cake from the boxed cake mix you forgot you had bought at Harris Teeter all those months ago when you were feeling exceptionally motivated. 

But there are a few problems — the core of your problem is you don’t have any butter. Or eggs. Or oil. Hm. Well, that’s quite a dilemma, my friend.

Don’t abandon hope, all ye who enter here. As sure as the Pope is Catholic, there’s a solution to your problem: Applesauce.

“What?”

Source: Pinterest

Applesauce.

Applesauce is actually a miracle commodity with the ability to replace butter, eggs and oil in cakes or similar soft baked-goods. 

In a classic Duncan Hines yellow cake mix recipe, you need one cup of water, one third of a cup of oil and three large eggs. 

In a typical dorm setting, you probably neither have eggs nor oil, but let’s say you have the eggs for our purposes. 

How can applesauce replace the oil in a cake mix you ask? 

Well, let’s get down to a super-basic molecular level: oil is a lipid: aka a fat and water-resistant (hydrophobic for all of you bio dorks out there), and works in a recipe to keep the flour in the cake mix from getting too wet. 

If flour gets too wet it forms gluten, which makes your cake super chewy and more like a weird cake-bread combo rather than a cake. 

Anyway, even though applesauce isn’t a lipid, it works in a vaguely similar manner: applesauce, like most fruits and fruit derivatives, contains pectin (apart of the polysaccharide family on the molecular level). 

Pectin essentially acts as a gelling agent, but it doesn’t protect or keep the flour from getting too wet like oil, but it actually challenges the flour for the water, similar to the way that the Pit Preachers compete with Gary for dominance to tell UNC students about Jesus’ saving grace. 

Since the applesauce wants the water too, it’ll keep the cake moist and keep the flour from getting too saturated. Get it?! 

Butter works super similarly in soft baked goods (but NOT for crispy stuff like cookies — it just won’t work). 

If you want more really cool super-scientific explanations on the functions of lipid and polysaccharide molecules in your cake then click here!

Awesome, but what if you don’t have eggs OR oil?? 

Now, eggs work as both a leavening agent and a binding agent in the cake recipe. 

First, leavening means that there’s air in your cake, and you can use eggs or applesauce because they both contain OCEANS of water. 

As the water evaporates from the eggs or the applesauce, it creates steam and traps air in the mix and makes your cake rise and become fluffy and moist. Yum. 

For the egg’s magical binding properties, we look back at our old friend, pectin, which is a GELLING agent! That means is BINDS things together! YES. Now your recipe is complete.

Now, go forth and bake your dorm cake. I hope you brought your applesauce.

Source: ABC News