dead cake

plural dead cakes

1. alternativeAlternative form of deadcake.

   Sanders Lansing was celebrated for her "dead cakes," bearing the monogram of the dead.

   1897, Mary Gay Humphreys, Catherine Schuyler, page 78

   2 more examples

   When any one was dead the friends would commence to make preparation for the funeral; in the first place after the corpse was laid out they would send for 35 or 50 gallons of Cherry wine, and some 15 or 22 gallons of it was taken and a compound of spices was put in it and made hot, and the rest was used cold; also two or three bushels of small sugar cake was made which was called Dote Kooken or dead cake, also three to five pounds of tobacco and from two to three hundred pipes ; then a table was set through the house in every room, on those tables is plates of cake, plates of tobacco and at each side of the plates of tobacco is a number of pipes and a roll of paper done up to light the tobacco; also candles lit, also wine put up in bottles and set on the table, and wine glasses; the spice wine was put in silver tankers and sat on the tables.

   1883, Jonathan Pearson, Junius Wilson MacMurray, A history of the Schenectady patent in the Dutch and English times

   For some Pennsylvanian Germans, wine and “dead cakes” were delivered when making such invitations; the cakes, which looked like large cookies and often had the deceased's initials scratched in them, “were not eaten but kept as a memento of the person who had died.

   2008, Kenneth L. Untiedt, Death Lore: Texas Rituals, Superstitions, and Legends of the Hereafter