This is going to be a bit of a rant, but I've been meaning to ask this for a while. What on earth is a
quiche-cake?
That term just confuses me. A quiche is a custard-like egg creation, where as a cake is a thing of flour and crumb (well, mostly... more on this later). The two just don't meet up in my mind. I mean, small-quiches would be best described as quiche-tartlets in the q-first paradigm. Quiches are typically of the pie family, which has an implication about the nature of it's crust (again, not very cakelike). The pie-ness of a quiche is pretty important. I mean, there are apple cakes, but they don't really strike me as apple-
pie-cakes. A lemon meringue cake makes sense, with a thick lemon curd layer and the cake itself 'frosted' in meringue, but that doesn't really scream "pie". But beyond the pie angle, the specific texture of a quiche seems central to what it is.
That said, it's also good to expand on the word cake. There's cheese cake, which is quite unlike, say, a typical Duncan Hines boxed grain-based cake. And there are also crab cakes, potato cakes, risotto cakes, where a thing quite uncakelike is formed into a small patty and fried crispy. Cake as shape (
non-food link here, don't want to put anyone off), rather than culinary item. That doesn't strike me as working for quiche in a food-science perspective; I don't think the ingredients of a quiche could be made to sit up in a pan and cook as something like a risotto cake would be cooked. Maybe a crustless quiche from a muffin tin could be called a "cake" just from physical form alone. That's probably the most realistic option that isn't a misnamed tartlet.
Or perhaps they are more akin to a pudding cake, where it's mostly a cake, but has a wetter, richer texture. As such, a quiche cake would be an extra egg-rich cake, with cheese, vegetables, and perhaps meat also incorporated. It would set-up much as a conventional flour cake, but be savory and dense from eggs.
As you can see, I've spent entirely too much time thinking about this for far too long.
