a sweet, baked, breadlike food, made with or without shortening, and usually containing flour, sugar, baking powder or soda, eggs, and liquid flavoring.
2.
a flat, thin mass of bread, esp. unleavened bread.
3.
pancake; griddlecake.
4.
a shaped or molded mass of other food: a fish cake.
5.
a shaped or compressed mass: a cake of soap; a cake of ice.
6.
Animal Husbandry. a compacted block of soybeans, cottonseeds, or linseeds from which the oil has been pressed, usually used as a feed or feed supplement for cattle.
–verb (used with object)
7.
to form into a crust or compact mass.
–verb (used without object)
8.
to become formed into a crust or compact mass.
—Idioms
9.
a piece of cake, Informal. something easily done: She thought her first solo flight was a piece of cake.
10.
take the cake, Informal.
a.
to surpass all others, esp. in some undesirable quality; be extraordinary or unusual: His arrogance takes the cake.
b.
to win first prize.
[Origin: 1200–50; ME < ON kaka; akin to ME kechel little cake, G Kuchen; see cookie]
c.1230, from O.N. kaka "cake," from W.Gmc. *kokon-, from PIE base *gag-, *gog- "something round, lump of something." Not related to L. coquere "to cook," as formerly supposed. Replaced its O.E. cognate, coecel. Originally (until c.1420) "a flat, round loaf of bread." Caked "thickly encrusted" (with) is from 1922. Let them eat cake is from Rousseau's "Confessions," in reference to an incident c.1740, when it was already proverbial, long before Marie Antoinette. The "cake" in question was not a confection, but a poor man's food.
"What man, I trow ye raue, Wolde ye bothe eate your cake and haue your cake?" ["The Proverbs & Epigrams of John Heywood," 1562]
Cac"kle\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Cackled (-k'ld); p. pr. & vb. n. Cackling.] [OE. cakelen; cf. LG. kakeln, D. kakelen, G. gackeln, gackern; all of imitative origin. Cf. Gagle, Cake to cackle.]1. To make a sharp, broken noise or cry, as a hen or goose does. When every goose is cackling. --Shak. 2. To laugh with a broken noise, like the cackling of a hen or a goose; to giggle. --Arbuthnot. 3. To talk in a silly manner; to prattle. --Johnson.
Cake\ (k[=a]k), n. [OE. cake, kaak; akin to Dan. kage, Sw. & Icel. kaka, D. koek, G. kuchen, OHG. chuocho.]1. A small mass of dough baked; especially, a thin loaf from unleavened dough; as, an oatmeal cake; johnnycake. 2. A sweetened composition of flour and other ingredients, leavened or unleavened, baked in a loaf or mass of any size or shape. 3. A thin wafer-shaped mass of fried batter; a griddlecake or pancake; as buckwheat cakes. 4. A mass of matter concreted, congealed, or molded into a solid mass of any form, esp. into a form rather flat than high; as, a cake of soap; an ague cake. Cakes of rusting ice come rolling down the flood. --Dryden. Cake urchin (Zo["o]l), any species of flat sea urchins belonging to the Clypeastroidea. Oil cake the refuse of flax seed, cotton seed, or other vegetable substance from which oil has been expressed, compacted into a solid mass, and used as food for cattle, for manure, or for other purposes. To have one's cake dough, to fail or be disappointed in what one has undertaken or expected. --Shak.
Cake\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Caked; p. pr. & vb. n. Caking.] To concrete or consolidate into a hard mass, as dough in an oven; to coagulate. Clotted blood that caked within. --Addison.
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