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Glite Dictionary
seed cake

seed cake

1 3.5
A sweet cake with seeds like caraway and a little lemon
  • noun
  • UK
translation icon : pastel de semillas
  • We enjoyed a slice of seed cake topped with lemon glaze after our meal.
  • poppy seed cake
  • Lemon Poppy Seed Cake
  • make seed cake

Examples

  • "We spent the whole afternoon talking together, having poppy-seed cake and strong tea."

    Fiction book (2000)

  • " How do you make poppy seed cake?

    Fiction book (1997)

  • See, I have some sesame seed cakes.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • My grandmother said, "Poppy seed cake?"

    Fiction book (1997)

  • Do parlor and a bakery that specialized in Mongolian seed cakes.

    Fiction book (1999)

  • "Sesame-seed cakes, we had.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • At the bakery, I saw a delicious seed cake made with caraway seeds.

  • For dessert, we had a moist seed cake flavored with sesame and lemon.

Synonyms

seedcake
vsseed cake
  • UK
7.3

A sweet cake with seeds like caraway or sesame and a lemon taste

has identical meaning but is written as two separate words

Surface Forms

seed cake singular
seed cakes plural

Morphology

seed + cake

The meaning is directly and compositionally derived from 'seed' (small plant part) + 'cake' (sweet baked good): it denotes a cake containing or flavored with seeds. This kind of noun–noun composition is common cross-linguistically and follows regular English compounding patterns, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

Seed cake comes from a simple idea: a cake baked with small seeds, like caraway or sesame, mixed into the batter. Because the seeds give a clear taste, people called it seed cake, so today the term means a 'sweet cake flavored with seeds'.