humble

rich

H?

moneyed

cash

liquidity

since this has been here unloved for a while now


anew

Good call, Chick.

birth

canal

dredge

icing

Why?  Because in some old time recipes you would see the instruction for topping a cake 'dredge with icing sugar'.  I nearly 'corpsed' the first time I encountered this at Tech College.  To me dredging meant removal or extraction by scooping out, both of which are a long way removed from sprinkling a light coating of dry icing sugar on a cream sponge.

Posh tables were set with a silver utensil like an oversized pepper-pot, called a sugar dredger.

royal

Royal icing is that hard icing you find on Christmas cakes.  My dad bought a Christmas cake once, and the icing was so hard I could only get the knife into it with the help of a hammer.  He took it back on Boxing Day.

King

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Jo:  That cake was probably iced the previous Christmas and not sold.  Or possibly used in the window for years as a display cake until someone unwittingly sold it.

The way to deal with surplus rich fruit celebration cakes, like  last minute cancellations on a wedding cake, is to strip off the marzipan - or cheaper fake 'almond paste' which is often made from peanuts, but still tastes pretty much the same - and icing, then wrap the cake in several layers of greaseproof paper.  A good cake will keep for several years before it dries out.  They very, very, rarely go mouldy.

This is how you keep the top tier of a wedding cake to redecorate later as a christening cake.  Wrap it tight, seal the package with Sellotape, and it will be ready to go when needed.

Window display cakes nowadays are usually a plastic base, covered with genuine icing but no marzipan.  In the old days they were tin forms, like the ones we used at tech college to learn icing.  At the end of a class we scraped them down, then washed and dried them ready for the next class.

Being hollow they were relatively lightweight and would slip off the icing turntable unless you stuck them down with a blob of icing first.  This was the kind of thing you only forgot to do once, after all your careful work slid off and was ruined  ;-)

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chess

board