The phrase "a flake of a" is not standard in written English and may be considered incorrect or awkward.
It could be used in a context where you are describing something as a small or insignificant part of a larger whole, but it is not commonly used.
Example: "He was just a flake of a person, never really committing to anything important."
Alternatives: "a fragment of a" or "a piece of a".
Already the moon had risen, a flake of waxy alabaster in a blue sky thin with light.
After the first course, a purée of butternut squash with orbs of finger lime, a bit of muscovado sugar, a flake of coconut and a sliver of Fresno pepper, all of which you suck from a glass tube, my guest and I were asked to sweep the leaves off the table.
The Winter Champagne Sparkler at Tappan Hill is a bubbly riff on mulled wine that contains an intricately spiced honey-pear water and is garnished with a nod to its forerunner — a flake of cinnamon stick and a delicate strip of orange peel studded with cloves.
The fish is soft (which is odd, since monkfish is the most firm of white fish) and tastes zestily gorgeous on oily sourdough with a flake of pickled cauliflower on top – a rustic treat in which the oil runs down your chin, and you wipe it away with the back of your hand like an Alentejo peasant.
In return, wives speak to husbands and refrain from walloping them with frying pans, backing a few vodkas and finding a flake of joy in the loins of some passing idiot, while maintaining the cold expression and emotional repertoire of a dead trout.
A flake of gold leaf in the rich lily-bulb soup.
** *** ** A flake of gold leaf in the rich lily-bulb soup.
In contrast, Levallois technology (Mode 3), a specific hierarchical core reduction strategy, entails the multistage shaping (façonnage) of a mass of stone (core) in preparation to detach a flake of predetermined size and shape from a single preferred surface (débitage) (14, 15).
Two TO-18 detectors with different filters, one acting as a detection channel and the other as a reference, a broadband light source, a circuit board and a flake of wire gauze are assembled and integrated into a gilded gas cell for the purpose of detecting ethene gas.
