teacake

noun teacakes · tea-cake

1. Ireland, Southern England, UK A flat, round bread bun, usually containing currants, sultanas or peel and often served toasted and buttered with tea. Molly poured from the teapot and Judith drank the strong hot tea and ate the buttered teacakes.
2. Cumbria, Northern England A bread roll without fruit; a barm. ... in Yorkshire and Lancashire mill-workers largely use the plain teacake as a convenient form of bread to be consumed at the meals which they carry with them to eat during the day when living far from their work.
3. Ireland, Scotland, UK A snack consisting of shortbread or wafer topped with meringue or marshmallow, coated in chocolate. Sometimes there was a Tunnock's wafer or (bastard) a chocolate marshmallow teacake in its red-and-silver foil.
4. Southern US, US, especially A traditional type of dense, large cookie, typically hard-baked, not particularly sweet, and with few extra fillings. He turned to get her attention then, but I didn't hear what he said because that was when Celeste asked me if a teacake was an American madeleine. And I said not really because it was really a very plain, not very sweet soft cookie, whereas a madeleine was very sweet like a down-home muffin and was
5. US A small delicate cake or pastry; a petit four. Madeleines: These buttery French teacakes, something between a sponge cake and a butter cake in texture, are traditionally baked in scallop-shaped madeleine molds, but you can use miniature muffin pans or small tartlet pans in any shape.
6. Australia A sweet cake similar to pound cake, sometimes sprinkled with cinnamon and caster sugar, often served warm. Teacakes in Australia are actually pound cakes, sometimes sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and so called just because they are eaten at teatime.
7. A cake flavoured with tea.
8. Ireland A fruit cake similar to a barmbrack (but often without yeast) flavoured with tea and whiskey, especially associated with Halloween. Barm brack, a raisin-studded teacake of gargantuan proportions, is the speciality of many an Irish matron. In the right hands, it is a divine thing. Ma's hands were not the right hands

   Similar: tea brack

9. A brick of dried tea. For quotations using this term, see Citations:teacake.