I keep laughing thinking of a Dwarf scoffing a huge birthday cake, which is not entirely without the realms of possibility; it certainly wouldn't be for a particularly greedy Hobbit.
No, but cake definitely means a sweet, small and very tasty cake indeed. If a little sponge cake, they often go by the name of buns or fairy cakes, and are possibly closest to cup cakes, but they come in infinite varieties; some have cream in them, some custard, some are in fact made with pastry, but to a man (or rather, to a cake) they are all sweet and
exceedingly good.
A
biscuit is also sweet and incredibly nice, especially the Chocolate Hob Nob. I suppose the closest American equivalent is the Cookie, which in the UK usually describes a
type of biscut, usually a very sweet one stuffed with chunks of chocolate and nuts, the kind of biscuits which make people exclaim when you produce them with a pot of tea. Some also like to dunk biscuits in their tea, an odious habit which means you get sludge at the bottom of the cup. Blee. Though I have comitted treason in saying it.
The closest things to American biscuits I suppose might be
crackers , which we tend to have with cheese or smoked salmon or other savoury things on top. But if it's something which accompanies a meal then the closest thing might be
Yorkshire Pudding, commonly served slathered in gravy with roast beef on Sundays. But this must not be confused with
Bakewell Pudding, obtainable fifteen miles from Yorkshire, and which like most things with the word 'pudding' in them is sweet. The only other savoury pudding is Steak & Kidney Pudding.
It is actually quite funny, because I'm sure Tolkien was
not playing with his words in this instance and trying to confuse matters linguistically. But by happy accident it does conjour up images of dwarves and Hobbits gorging on vast portions of food. Was anyone in America confused by the idea of eating fish with chips then?