noun, verb, caked, cak⋅ing.| 1. | 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. |
| 7. | to form into a crust or compact mass. |
| 8. | to become formed into a crust or compact mass. |
| 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.
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"What man, I trow ye raue, Wolde ye bothe eate your cake and haue your cake?" ["The Proverbs & Epigrams of John Heywood," 1562]
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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