cake
/keɪk
/- Desserts, sweets, cakes, biscuits, and pastries are considered to be luxuries.
- Little chefs can bake a cake or delicious muffins in the two-shelf oven or store extra plates and bowls in the cupboard.
- Now she manages to control her feelings by avoiding sweet foods such as cakes, chocolate and even bananas.
Synonyms
- The corporate sector could not be securing a bigger part of national income cake too.
- Now, there are three or four other independents looking for a share of the cake.
- Fellow Namibians let's be fair to each other and share the national cake equally.
- Flake some on a green salad, mix some into a pasta salad, or shape some into salmon cakes.
- Season, form into six round cakes, and sear on both sides until golden brown, about five minutes.
- To serve, spoon three small amounts of mushroom cake on to warm plate.
- Quickly getting in, and grabbing the cake of soap and wash cloth lying nearby I get to work.
- To clean our teeth some of us used a cake of pink cleaner in a round aluminium tin.
- Once a family is ready to spare about two hours, they can easily make as many as 25 soap cakes.
Synonyms
- Dried blood caked the front of the late king's clothes and the broken hand which still clutched his sword.
- It didn't look like it had been used in ages, dust and dirt caked the inside, there were even some dead insects in it.
- Glancing out the main window, she could see only a brown haze - the surface was caked with dust.
Synonyms
- Riders were arriving with red dirt caked on thick to their faces, with specks of dirt attaching themselves to each singular pore and whisker.
- I turned the locket over, seeing there was a red substance caked onto the smooth backing.
- They had brown and greenish substance caked on it which was not very appealing to Vaius.
Synonyms
Phrases
cakes and ale
a piece of cake
sell like hot cakes
take the cake
you can't have your cake and eat it (too)
Derivatives
cakey
- Viv and Sarah had a chocolate cakey thing which had the most lovely chocolate sauce, all rich and bitter, but the whole thing was very very rich, even for someone as chocolate pudding obsessed as myself.
- On birthdays, one of us would bake a cake (usually carrot or chocolate), and when the slabs of sweetness went around the gathering on paper napkins, a bass voice would pipe from the corner ‘No thanks, I'm not really a cakey kind of person’.
- And of course, mint tea and sticky cakey things.
Origin
Middle English (denoting a small flat bread roll): of Scandinavian origin; related to Swedish kaka and Danish kage.
This is a Scandinavian word and the first cakes were small flat bread rolls baked hard on both sides by being turned during the baking process—you can see the idea of a rounded flattened shape surviving in fishcake and potato cake. The word occurs in many common expressions as something pleasant or desirable. The phrase cakes and ale, for example, means ‘merrymaking, a good time’. It comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, when the roistering Sir Toby Belch says to the puritanical steward Malvolio: ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ The idea behind the saying you can't have your cake and eat it is that you cannot enjoy both of two equally desirable but mutually exclusive things. The expression has been around since at least the mid 17th century. Let them eat cake is what Marie-Antoinette (1755–93), wife of Louis XVI (1754–93) of France, is alleged to have said on being told that her people had no bread. (The French word she is supposed to have used was brioche, not cake.) This story is good, but its authenticity is suspect—Louis XIV's wife is supposed to have said ‘Why don't they eat pastry?’ in a similar situation.