bridecake

plural bridecakes · alternative bride-cake

1. archaiccountableuncountableSynonym of wedding cake.

   But when the day should come for sending a piece of bridecake and cards with ‘Mrs. Herbert’ on them, all these wrongs would be avenged!

   1860, Mary Theresa Vidal, chapter 15, in Bengala, Or, Some Time Ago, volume 1, London: John W. Parker & Son, pages 193–194

   4 more examples

   This day my Julia thou must make For Mistresse Bride, the wedding Cake: Knead but the Dow, and it will be To paste of Almonds turn’d by thee: Or kisse it thou, but once, or twice, And for the Bride-Cake ther’l be Spice.

   1648, Robert Herrick, “The Bride-Cake”, in Hesperides

   Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard.

   1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter 3, in Middlemarch […], volume I, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book I

   The Glacier des Bois is no more. Of that of our days is left a little white tongue of ice showing in the blank bed. . . . But the saddest of all is Mont Blanc itself from here—it is, to what it was, as a mere whitewashed wall to a bridecake.

   1874, John Ruskin, letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 12 October, 1874, in Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904, p. 107

   He came as a Baker: but owned, when too late— And it drove the poor Bellman half-mad— He could only bake Bridecake—for which, I may state, No materials were to be had.

   1874–1876 (date written), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Fit the Fit the First.⁠ The Landing.”, in The Hunting of the Snark […], London: Macmillan and Co., published March 1876, →OCLC

   Synonyms: wedding cake