Can you bake a cherry pie?

How about a nice chocolate cake?



I started to write a short story here, but it involved dialogue that included the phrase "piece of cake". I got sidetracked.


"Piece of cake" "Easy as pie" These indicate that a task or a job is easy.

What's so simple about a piece of cake or easy about a slice of pie? Obviously, it wasn't a baker who came up with these sayings.

It's not really that hard to make a pie or bake a cake - but I have an electric mixer, an automatic oven, and a timer shaped like an egg. These sayings have been around a long time. Back when you beat a cake by hand, chopped wood for the oven, and timed baked goods by singing hymns.

I found an explanation that sounded reasonable for "piece of cake". It used to be the custom at church fetes and country fairs to have a cake walk contest. You only had to navigate around a circle to play. In one version, you walked in a circle while music played. When the music stopped, the person standing on the winning square won a cake.

But when you think about it, that doesn't sound right unless in some counties, the prize was a piece of cake, not the whole thing.

"Easy as pie" has something to do with an archaic Moiri word 'pai' which means good. That didn't make much sense to me either.

Other sources gave me different origins for these phrases and claimed these expressions were barely 70 - 100 years old.

I came to two conclusions. (1) "Piece of cake" and "Easy as pie" are related; they refer to how pleasurable and easy it is to eat dessert and (2) People make up stuff when they don't know the answers.