rock cake
3.7
A small rough cake with dried fruit, hard outside and soft inside
- noun
- UK
:
pastel de roca
- She brought a box of homemade rock cakes to share with her friends.
Examples
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At the party, everyone enjoyed the crumbly texture of the rock cakes.
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Would you like a rock cake?
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Try a rock cake, Mr. Allnut.
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The baker made a dozen delicious rock cakes for the afternoon tea.
How Hard
Surface Forms
rock cake singular
rock cakes plural
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from 'rock' (hard/rough, appearance) + 'cake' (a baked sweet), so it denotes a cake that looks or feels like a rock. This noun+noun compounding pattern is a regular descriptive process in English and is cross‑linguistically intuitive, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should be able to infer the meaning.
Etymology
Rock cake may come from the cake's hard, rough surface that looks like a little rock. That's why the expression means a 'small, rough-textured cake'.