Piece of Cake

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Meaning:

Piece of Cake means A straightforward task that can easily be accomplished. An easy chore, A no-hassle task

“Ahh, piece of cake.”

Origin:

There is another expression similar to this one that goes ‘as easy as pie.’ -But that's another video - Both sayings have identical meanings—they express ease, but why?

It probably doesn’t have to do with the cooking part of these desserts, because baking a cake or pie requires a fair bit of work. First, you have to buy all of the ingredients. Then you have to make it by mixing all the necessary parts together. Then it has to be made up and put in the oven, and you wait for it to cook. Okay, it’s not exactly difficult, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy either. I am not so sure the origin of this idiom comes from the baking of the cake.

However, eating the cake once it finishes cooking, now that is a different story that is way easier - eating a piece of cake is easy because, well, it’s delicious!

This phrase goes back to the 1930s where the earliest citation of it that I can find is from the American poet and humorist Ogden Nash's in Primrose Path, in 1936 it reads:

"Her picture's in the papers now, And life's a piece of cake."

Example:

Today we still use “piece of cake” to express that a task will be easy, with no effort. An example sentence is:

“Putting this puzzle together is a piece of cake, I prefer when they are a bit more challenging.”

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Origins of Expressions

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