What is cake?

March 9, 2019 3:14 AM

This seemingly simple question in the village pub led to a multi-hour discussion session/shouting/a scone being vindictively thrown, with no real conclusion and two people and an amateur baker now barred. The wikipedia page says cake is “...a form of sweet dessert that is typically baked” but people angrily came up with exceptions. Other definitions point to ingredients of flour, sugar, eggs and something else (varies), while one says it is soft, and the only commonality being that cake is sweet. Is there an all-encompassing and accurate definition for cake, either formal or informal?
posted by Wordshore to Food & Drink (45 answers total)

Best answer: Look up the infamous Jaffa Cake case.

Essentially, there is no fixed definition, but overlapping similarities or criteria. It’s an example of the post modern ideas about the limitations of language- is meaning defined by usage, or by some inherent quality?

Having said that, I always thought the idea that a cake ‘hardens when stale’ was a useful one.
posted by Dwardles at 3:34 AM on March 9, 2019 [15 favorites]

Best answer: Is there an all-encompassing and accurate definition for cake

I think you only get all-encompassing and accurate definitions for things like mathematical concepts and fundamental particles. Not for things like ‘cake’, ‘sandwich’ or ‘chair’. People love arguing about definitions but baked goods form a whole continuum of cakey-biscuity-bready things which will never have precise boundaries.

For me, the general difference is that cake is crumblier than bread (i.e. less gluten structure) and bigger and thicker than a biscuit. And the basic building block should be flour (not necessarily wheat). So panettone (too gluteny), and baked cheesecake (too cheesy) both fall outside my personal boundaries for defining cake. But if someone disagreed I wouldn’t say they were wrong.

This post about another ambiguous term, soup, in British vs American English, is interesting. It distinguishes between defining a term according to its boundaries and defining it by its prototypical example.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 3:43 AM on March 9, 2019 [9 favorites]

My personal but formal enough for me definition is that if it rises only in the oven it's cake, if it rises before going in the oven, it's bread.

Someone will now poke holes in this reasoning, but I'm not listening.
posted by deadwax at 4:08 AM on March 9, 2019 [6 favorites]

My mum is 88. She has baked cakes all her life. She says, if it has an egg in it, it's a cake.
posted by Morpeth at 4:09 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

if it rises only in the oven it's cake

I used to wonder why my mother called soda bread, soda cake. Now I know.
posted by night_train at 4:14 AM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]

The wikipedia page says cake is “...a form of sweet dessert that is typically baked”

That's weird, because as we all know* cake is certainly not a dessert but a sweet treat to be had with coffee or tea, specifically on birthdays and other festive occasions. Cake after a full meal is just wrong. Who even wants that?

Srsly now: as the above demonstrates, this is all highly cultural and therefore you will not find clear and unambiguous definitions that everyone agrees on.

*at least in this country
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:28 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Cake after a full meal is just wrong. Who even wants that?

Right thinking people of all sorts.

I have had multiple arguments about quickbreads vs cakes and I have decided that if you can put icing or ganache on it it is cake.
posted by jeather at 4:43 AM on March 9, 2019 [6 favorites]

My mum is 88. She has baked cakes all her life. She says, if it has an egg in it, it's a cake.

That would make a frittata a cake.

Legally it's a taste and texture call. (I know Americans don't consider a brownie a cake, but this is, as previously noted, all very cultural.)
posted by DarlingBri at 4:45 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

Bloxworth Snout, I liked the soup link so much that I literally tried to favorite your post twice.
posted by eirias at 4:47 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

My own definition of cake, honed over many years, is that it's anything that 'cakes'. So gunpowder can form a cake. Mud can too. I understand that you're talking about food, but really, a word that gets used so often outside the culinary sphere isn't ever going to have a pure definition in a food context. It's a fun argument to have, in the sense that it's an exercise in exploring the outside edges of a notion, but I'd just leave it at 'For me, a cake is...', and respect that whatever that is, is not the same for everyone. Arguments along the lines of 'What is a pie?' or 'What is a vegetable?' or even 'What is a Cornish pasty?' can never be answered unless you're going to achieve some sort of universal consensus. And we don't really have those in any realm.
posted by pipeski at 4:50 AM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]

jeather:
I have had multiple arguments about quickbreads vs cakes and I have decided that if you can put icing or ganache on it it is cake.

Doughnuts seem like an interesting boundary case here. We in America put icing on many/most of our donuts, but only some of them are called “cake doughnuts.” Indeed, the other kind are called “raised,” which brings to mind deadwax’s comment about how cakeness is affected by where the putative cake rises.
posted by eirias at 5:01 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Ah, sorry: a cake is made up of multiple servings, too. (Though the icing distinction is how I separate out muffins and cupcakes.)

Doughnuts are not cake.
posted by jeather at 5:04 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

Multiple servings! Huh! Fascinating. So what about those little single-serving cakes you can get at pastry shops or restaurants?

Or what about petits-fours? For the latter (assuming I understand their production correctly) would you say that a whole baking sheet worth of petits-fours is the cake and each individual cube is a piece of cake?
posted by eirias at 5:14 AM on March 9, 2019 [4 favorites]

I hate to disagree with an 88-year-old baker, but here goes. I’m vegan. I make cakes without eggs that taste just like cakes with eggs. My omnivore friends will attest to that. There are also wartime cake recipes that don’t call for eggs.
posted by FencingGal at 5:14 AM on March 9, 2019 [6 favorites]

From Websters Dictionary (1913):

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.
posted by Lanark at 5:18 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

What about crab cakes?!
posted by mareli at 5:19 AM on March 9, 2019 [8 favorites]

Re brownies: I have an old Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook that has a recipe for brownies called “Neither Cake Nor Candy.” That doesn’t prove anything, but I thought I’d add it to the mix.
posted by FencingGal at 5:20 AM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]

A single serving cake is either a cake, sliced up in a non traditional shape, or it is a cupcake, baked in a non traditional shape.

I really enjoy making hard stances on the boundaries of desserts.
posted by jeather at 5:25 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

A single serving cake is either a cake, sliced up in a non traditional shape, or it is a cupcake, baked in a non traditional shape.

Oooh, we definitely disagree - for me a cupcake is hand food. One of those semi gooey lava cake things definitely can’t be a cupcake. On the other hand, this is a Wordshore post, so perhaps in this post we should call that a pudding?
posted by eirias at 5:35 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Hmm, I see your distinction. I think I am ok with calling it a pudding, like I do a self saucing cake (which isn't exactly a cake but isn't exactly not)
posted by jeather at 5:47 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: This is a clear case for the Wittgensteinian linguistic concept of family resemblances. Cake is a family of objects that share several among a pool of traits, but there is no one trait that all cakes have.
posted by Andrhia at 5:49 AM on March 9, 2019 [29 favorites]

It's also worth considering leavening agents: cake is generally leavened with baking powder and/or baking soda and/or the addition of air (the role of whipped egg whites in an angel food cake, for instance), while bread is generally leavened with yeast. So that's where things start to get tricky with doughnuts (cake vs. yeast) and with quick breads (definitely on the cake end of the spectrum). And a rum baba throws the whole thing into confusion....actually, I agree with eirias, that's probably a pudding.
posted by notquitejane at 5:50 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Can you serve it for a birthday without a child asking bewildered, where is my cake?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:50 AM on March 9, 2019 [25 favorites]

Every time there is a debate like this, I think about this comic.

Language is Use
posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:57 AM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]

The correct definition of a (piece of) cake clearly isn't a piece of cake.

Anyway, cake is what Mefites write their words on to eat them. Right?
posted by Stoneshop at 5:57 AM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]

Cake in the Eurovision Song Contest.
posted by JanetLand at 5:58 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

If "Is a __ a cake?" approaches the ubiquitousness of "Is a __ a sandwich?" on my Internet, I just may stay offline forever.
posted by DanSachs at 6:32 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I think you only get all-encompassing and accurate definitions for things like mathematical concepts and fundamental particles.

Yeah, food historian here. The general consensus in the field is that there are few fixed categorical definitions in food and that in food nomenclature, culture and tradition rule. Trying to derive sharp taxonomies is a fool's game.
posted by Miko at 6:33 AM on March 9, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Wittgenstein tells us that there can be no definitions in the cake game; moreover, if bakers could speak we would still not be able to understand what they said.
posted by Segundus at 9:05 AM on March 9, 2019 [12 favorites]

Best answer: Is there an all-encompassing and accurate definition for cake, either formal or informal?

No. In linguistics we talk about categorization of things, sort of like what Andrhia talks about above. You group like with like and you get an idea (within cultures, certainly not cross-cultural) of what a certain community thinks os cake-like with outliers and platonic ideals. Sort of like how most people can look at a robin (in the us or the UK) and think "Yeah that is pretty much an obvious BIRD" whereas other things like a platypus or an ostrich or a kiwi are thought of as less centrally birdlike. Same thing with a word like GAME there are some obvious games and then less-obvious games.

So to me, from the US, New England, a cake adheres a lot to the flour/sugar/eggs definition (shortcake is not a cake, it's a cookie). It's sweet. You can cut it into parts. It has a bread-y texture but is not leavened. But I would never fight with someone else over the definition because I find those games tiresome because you can never arrive at any answer that isn't either completely pedantic (or worse, culturally oppressive) or "it depends."
posted by jessamyn at 9:07 AM on March 9, 2019 [4 favorites]

Wittgenstein tells us that there can be no definitions in the cake game; moreover, if bakers could speak we would still not be able to understand what they said.

The world is everything that is the cake.
posted by aws17576 at 10:01 AM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]

Best answer: What you are mistaking is that the definition of any word is a static thing. The word may first appear in the early thirteenth century when its meaning was a flat or comparatively thin mass of baked dough and comes from the Old Norse where it might have been pronounced kaka.

The verb caked implies that it is something plastered onto something else. Cake was originally bread, and either baked on a stone in the hearth or in an oven - a sealed chamber where a fire had burned and the ashes and cinders been removed before the dough was placed inside so that the heat retained in the chamber would cook the grain. You made up the dough and slab it out on the stone where it stuck. Bread, of course, is a kind of baked porridge, especially early on when the gluten content would have been negligible.

There is an old nursery rhyme, "Blow winds blow, blow winds blow, that the miller may grind his corn. That the baker may take and bake me a cake, that we shall have bread in the morn."

The word cake is comparative to the word loaf, not to the word bread. It defined the shape and preparation, not the material it is comprised of. Thus we can make pies out of mud, have sugar loafs, hamburger patties and cakes of paint in our watercolour box. But of course people being people and we have used the word that describes the properties of the object as if it were a noun, in order to be more specific than if we use an indefinite term like it and to save having to add the obvious extra information, "Put the cake (of dough) in the oven."

This is why the meaning is so nebulous, once it got used to signify distinguish an object rather than how the object was made. You will never get an agreement on this. To a two-year-old it's not cake unless it has icing and candles on it and the family sings "Happy Birthday". To some people if you put dried fruit in it, it is a cake even if it is made with yeast but the two-year-old would refute that with gouts of tears. If you live in Asia you might make your cake with beans. Every area and family has its own typical cake. In another family if you say, "Come home for cake," they will accuse you of lying if you produce a fancy pound cake with fruit and cream because they assumed you meant chocolate.

Cake certainly has the connotation of something more special than regular bread, but there are plenty of people who are more likely to eat cake than they are bread, and plenty of breads -chocolatine, for example, which is fancier than some other sorts of cake, such as a pancake. But it's all relative. It's like arguing over who is Mom. I'm going to have a different perspective than you, and I'm going to spell it differently too.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:03 AM on March 9, 2019 [12 favorites]

Best answer: My mother made a dish called Plantation shortcake. My Dad liked it at the cafeteria, so my Mom called and got the recipe. Corn meal cooked with broth, cooled and mixed with beaten eggs, milk, and chicken. It has some baking powder, and has a texture between quiche and corn pudding. I had been craving it and made it this week. Savory and delicious. I may try it with additions other than chicken.

cake
noun
1a : a breadlike food made from a dough or batter that is usually fried or baked in small flat shapes and is often unleavened
b : a sweet baked food made from a dough or thick batter usually containing flour and sugar and often shortening, eggs, and a raising agent (such as baking powder)
c : a flattened usually round mass of food that is baked or fried a fish cake
2a : a block of compacted or congealed matter a cake of ice
b : a hard or brittle layer or deposit
3 : something easily done

transitive verb
1 : encrust caked with dust
2 : to fill (a space) with a packed mass

Cake has wide usage. Pancake, angel food cake, johnnycake. Muffins are pretty much cake, as is plum pudding. There are yeasted cakes. And some time soonish, there will be cakes of ice on lake, instead of a foot of ice. I say it's cake, and please may I have some!
posted by theora55 at 10:04 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

So now I am laughing at the thought of a pub-fight over the meaning of cake, crying over the Latvian Eurovision song, and also craving ginger ale because of the soup link.
This must be the best ask ever.
I was looking for an anecdote from my childhood, supposed to be from Scotland, where some poor people called wheat bread cake. I couldn't find it, but I did find an interesting wiki about the famous "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" quote. A brioche isn't a cake at all, and Marie-Antoinette never said it.
It seems cake is a more contentious subject than I ever knew.
posted by mumimor at 10:20 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Cake is a family of objects that share several among a pool of traits, but there is no one trait that

... takes the cake.

(sorry)
posted by Stoneshop at 10:39 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

Like hot dogs, cakes belong to the genus Sandwico.
posted by Beardman at 10:39 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Andrhia got there first.

Stottie cake is not something you'd call a cake, but it's called a cake.
posted by holgate at 12:53 PM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

The cake is a lie, but I wish your pub was my local.
posted by bored_now_flay at 2:14 PM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

I've always thought cake was about form or shape, and having been molded in some way (pans, molds, or hands).
Bundt cake, soap cake, crab cake.

(And for that matter, what's a SALAD, anyway?)
posted by mdrew at 2:25 PM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

It's more or less the dessert equivalent of a plate of beans . . .

On a more serious note, I've been baking whole wheat bread and adding an egg or two per loaf. It's a common way of improving the texture of bread, and the end result is most definitely bread, not cake.
posted by flug at 10:49 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

It’s a texture thing in my own taxonomy - an essential softness - a cake of soap etc
posted by Middlemarch at 6:34 AM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

BUt cakes of soap (or ice, or yeast) are not soft.
posted by Miko at 10:10 AM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Assuming we're limiting ourselves to the common definition of cake to be eaten by people, as recognized by Americans and Brits, the determination of a cake is not what it looks like or what it contains as much as the methods of its construction. Cakes have a creaming step, where butter is mixed with eggs prior to adding any dry ingredients. After the butter is creamed with the eggs, it's combined with the flour and other ingredients in such a way that part of the dry ingredients are completely mixed with the wet ingredients before additional dry ingredients are added. (Bob's Red Mill Chantilly Cake Recipe as example). Even vegan cakes have this step with alternative ingredients.

Scones/muffins/biscuits almost always have the ingredients all mixed together in one unitary step OR have the butter mixed whole (without addition of eggs or sugar). (e. g. Mary Berry Fruit Scone Recipe)

Cookies contain the same ingredients as cake but in slightly different proportions. (Pioneer Woman Sugar Cookie recipe)

Brownies are a monstrosity of baking alchemy - they contain way more egg and butter in proportion to their flour than they should. As a result, they're a wetter, denser, crisper cake-like thing. (Alton Brown's Brownie Recipe 2.0 from his new show)
posted by fiercekitten at 10:39 AM on March 10, 2019 [2 favorites]

Cakes have a creaming step, where butter is mixed with eggs prior to adding any dry ingredients.

Refrigerator cakes don't have this.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 9:56 PM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

A lot of cakes don't have eggs. And there are one bowl cakes and dump cakes where you just mix everything at once, no creaming.

I think ingredient-based or process-based definitions are going to fall apart based on the standard technologies and types of processed food available at the time they were codified.
posted by Miko at 2:04 PM on March 12, 2019 [1 favorite]