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My wife bought some cakes (I don't know what the cake is called) for my son as shown in the above picture. There was some cream (butter or milk or whatever) inside the core of each cake.

Normally, he was supposed to eat the cake with its butter together. But he put his finger into the core of the cake and ate the butter separately, which smeared butter all over his hands.

How to express to eat something all together without eating each parts of it separately?

For example, can we say "please eat it as a whole"?

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    I think this isn't something many Anglophones would ever need or wish to say, so there's not really a "standard" way of expressing it. The best I can think of is Eat it whole! Sep 17, 2020 at 16:03
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    You might say "Stop playing with your food!" Sep 17, 2020 at 16:05
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    Why can't the poor little boy eat his cake however he wants? Sep 17, 2020 at 17:34
  • "All together" is probably the most common way I've heard. "The whole cake / the whole thing" works too. Or you could say "don't eat the bits separately" or "don't eat the filling on its own!" which are ways to describe the opposite, and say "not that" Sep 17, 2020 at 19:07
  • I had a father like Tom. Hence my occasional comments in these questions. Sep 17, 2020 at 19:08

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I don't think there's a single word that you can use to express this idea. A native speaker would likely tell his son, "you have to eat the whole thing" or "you can't just eat the inside of the cookie".

A common phrase that parents use when kids aren't treating their food properly is "don't play with your food". It doesn't always literally mean "play" (although it can, if the kid is fooling around with it), but rather it expresses that the food item should be eaten in a socially acceptable way.

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