cake   (kāk)    n.   A sweet baked food made of flour, liquid, eggs, and other ingredients, such as raising agents and flavorings. A flat rounded mass of dough or batter, such as a pancake that is baked or fried. A flat rounded mass of hashed or chopped food that is baked or fried; a patty. A shaped or molded piece, as of soap or ice. A layer or deposit of compacted matter: a cake of grime in the oven. v.   caked, cak·ing, cakes v.   tr. To cover or fill with a thick layer, as of compacted matter: a miner whose face was caked with soot. v.   intr. To become formed into a compact or crusty mass: As temperatures dropped, the wet snow caked. [Middle English, from Old Norse kaka.]

Cake

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 

Cake

Cakes made of wheat or barley were offered in the temple. They were salted, but unleavened (Ex. 29:2; Lev. 2:4). In idolatrous worship thin cakes or wafers were offered "to the queen of heaven" (Jer. 7:18; 44:19). Pancakes are described in 2 Sam. 13:8, 9. Cakes mingled with oil and baked in the oven are mentioned in Lev. 2:4, and "wafers unleavened anointed with oil," in Ex. 29:2; Lev. 8:26; 1 Chr. 23:29. "Cracknels," a kind of crisp cakes, were among the things Jeroboam directed his wife to take with her when she went to consult Ahijah the prophet at Shiloh (1 Kings 14:3). Such hard cakes were carried by the Gibeonites when they came to Joshua (9:5, 12). They described their bread as "mouldy;" but the Hebrew word _nikuddim_, here used, ought rather to be rendered "hard as biscuit." It is rendered "cracknels" in 1 Kings 14:3. The ordinary bread, when kept for a few days, became dry and excessively hard. The Gibeonites pointed to this hardness of their bread as an evidence that they had come a long journey. We read also of honey-cakes (Ex. 16:31), "cakes of figs" (1 Sam. 25:18), "cake" as denoting a whole piece of bread (1 Kings 17:12), and "a [round] cake of barley bread" (Judg. 7:13). In Lev. 2 is a list of the different kinds of bread and cakes which were fit for offerings.

cake

see eat one's cake and have it, too; flat as a pancake; icing on the cake; nutty as a fruitcake; piece of cake; sell like hot cakes; slice of the pie (cake); take the cake.

cake

in general, any of a variety of breads, shortened or unshortened, usually shaped by the tin in which it is baked; more specifically, a sweetened bread, often rich or delicate.

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