You can't have your cake and eat it

This is fucked up because what’s the point of having cake if you can’t eat it and enjoy the flavor

"eat your cake and have it" does make the phrase easier to parse but if you say that too loud they start calling you Mrs Kaczynski at the function :(

the other day i got my friend a cake before visiting her house for celebration purposes, we were all fairly excited to eat the cake together yet we had too much food before desert that we simply couldn't eat anything anymore, even though i had to leave early in the morning and we couldn't have had our cheerful cake moment together at all. that night at a certain point i figured this just might have been one of the very few—if not the only—moments in my life in which this proverb would just naturally spawn along my internal monologue then would actually fit the situation both literally and figuratively.

My theory is that this originates from a time when cakes were the go-to example for a commodity (as in "its selling like hot cakes"). So "having the cake" is meant to refer specifically to "being the owner of" the cake, and the ambiguity comes from the polysemy of "to have"

thumbs down.