bridecake

• bride-cake

bride +‎ cake

bridecake (countable and uncountable, plural bridecakes)

1. (archaic) Rich or highly ornamented cake, to be distributed to the guests at a wedding, or sent to friends after the wedding.
   • 1648, Robert Herrick, “The Bride-Cake” in Hesperides,

     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.

   • 1860, Mary Theresa Vidal, Bengala, Or, Some Time Ago, London: John W. Parker & Son, Volume 1, Chapter 15, pp. 193-194,

     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!

   • 1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter 3, in Middlemarch […], volume I, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, OCLC 948783829, book I:

     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.

   • 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

     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.

   • 1876, Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark […] , London: Macmillan, Fit the First.⁠ The Landing:

     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.

• wedding cake