piece of cake
a piece of cake
- very easy task
- something easily done
- very simple work
- a simple thing to do
- effortlessly prepared or done
- simple job that can straightforwardly be accomplished
- When I was asked to write a short poem by our new teacher, it was a piece of cake to me.
- Don’t take it as a piece of cake, hiking is very tiring task.
- The engineering interview proved to be a piece of cake.
- You can’t achieve your big dream from theses pieces of cake.
- Juggling is not easy to perform, but its a piece of cake for Carl, I wonder how he do it so easily.
It is believed that this phrase invented in the 1870s once it was ritual to present cakes as awards in contests. In several provinces of the USA at that period, slaves would contribute in ‘cake walks’ where teams would perform a dance mocking the gesture of their rulers. The most elegant team would be given a cake as an award. From this, the idiom ‘a piece of cake’ started being used to explain something that was easy to get.
The concept of this idiom perhaps originates from several cakes having pleasant tastes, and therefore effortless to get through.
This idiomatic expression is initially started in writings since 1936, in American English.
The first quotation of it which can be found is from the American bard and comedian Ogden Nash’s Primrose Path, 1936:
“Her picture’s in the papers now and life’s a piece of cake.”
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