Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hoe-cake
1745, American English, said to be so called because it originally was baked on the broad thin blade of a cotton-field hoe (n.).
Usage examples of "hoe-cake".
Here and there lies a fragment of hoe-cake or a bit of an old blanket that has been forgotten.
Her corn-cake, in all its varieties of hoe-cake, dodgers, muffins, and other species too numerous to mention, was a sublime mystery to all less practised compounders.
I found my education at Jonesville in the art of baking a hoe-cake now came in good play, both for myself and companions.