take the biscuit

Example: “I've heard some lame excuses, but blaming the dog for a missing email really takes the biscuit.”

Origin: The British reshaping of an older American phrase. "Take the cake" is the earlier form and has a documented source: the cakewalk, a competitive strutting dance developed by enslaved and later free Black Americans in the nineteenth century, in which the couple judged best was awarded a cake as the prize. To take the cake was therefore to win outright, and the sarcastic modern sense — that something is outstanding in the wrong direction — is an ironic inversion of a genuine victory. British English substituted the biscuit late in the nineteenth century, keeping the structure and the irony while swapping in a more domestic prize. Both forms now do essentially the same work, and the sarcastic use has almost entirely displaced the literal one.