kaka

Old Norse kaka meant a flat, round baked item — closer to what we would call a thick cracker or oatcake than a layered birthday confection. The word likely comes from Proto-Germanic *kakō, though its deeper origins are unclear. Norse settlers brought kaka to England during the Danelaw period of the 800s-900s, and it gradually replaced or merged with the Old English word for similar baked goods. By Middle English, cake (spelled cake or kake) meant any bread-like food baked in a specific shape.

For centuries, cake was not sweet in the modern sense. An oatcake was pressed oats. A johnnycake was cornmeal flatbread. A pancake was batter cooked flat. Sugar was expensive, and what we now think of as cake — a raised, sweetened, frosted product — did not become common until the 1700s, when sugar from Caribbean plantations dropped in price. The democratization of cake tracks the history of colonial sugar.

The phrase "Let them eat cake" (Qu'ils mangent de la brioche) was attributed to Marie Antoinette but almost certainly not said by her. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recorded a version of the anecdote in his Confessions, written around 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and living in Austria. The phrase was already a cliché about royal indifference. Pinning it on Marie Antoinette was political convenience, not historical accuracy.

Modern English uses cake as both noun and metaphor. A cakewalk is something easy (from a dance competition in which the prize was a cake). You can't have your cake and eat it too. The icing on the cake. A piece of cake. The word carries more idioms per syllable than almost any other food term in English, which is what happens when a word stays in daily use for eleven hundred years.