Fans of the popular British baking show know that you don’t want your many-layered cake to concertina, or “collapse like an accordion.” The verb concertina, in this sense, derives from the name of an accordion-like instrument. This is part of a...
Sara in Madison, Wisconsin, was reading an old edition of The Joy of Cooking and came across a recipe that described a cake’s ingredients as earrings for an elephant. She couldn’t discern whether the authors meant that was a good thing or a bad...
Fans of The Great British Bake Off (known in the U.S. as The Great British Baking Show because of a trademark issue) know that you don’t want your baked goods to be stodgy or claggy. The verb to stodge, meaning “to stuff,” goes back some 400 years...
In railroad workers’ slang, the expression to bake a cake means to build up steam in a locomotive by stoking a fire. Another term for a train’s fireman is bakehead. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Railroad Baking Slang” I came...
Kid cheater and child cheater are synonyms for spatula, because when you’re baking a cake, a spatula is so efficient for removing the remnants of a sweet mixture from a bowl that there’s little left for a kid to lick off. This is part of a complete...
Restekuchen, or baked goods made with leftover ingredients, are popular in Germany, where their name translates as “scrap cake.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “German Scrap Cake” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Mary...