cake

Cake is the soft sweet thing you bake in a tin and cut into slices — flour, eggs, sugar and butter, with icing on top if you are lucky. The one with candles on your birthday, the tall white one at a wedding, a slice in a paper case beside a coffee.

Cake is countable and uncountable at once, and that catches people out: would you like some cake asks for a share of one, while she baked three cakes counts whole ones. The word stretches to any flat pressed round — a cake of soap, a fish cake, a rice cake — and there is a verb, as in boots caked with mud. Then the idioms, which are everywhere: a piece of cake is something easy, the icing on the cake is a bonus on top of something already good, you cannot have your cake and eat it means choose one, and that takes the cake is what you say when something is the worst yet. Cakehole is British slang for the mouth, and it is as rude as it sounds.

Phrases it lives in

• a piece of cake — something very easy to do
• the icing on the cake — an extra good thing on top of something already good
• have your cake and eat it — to want two good things that cannot both be had
• take the cake — to be the most outrageous example so far