to pipe the eye
- phrasal verb
- Specialized
:
decorar con glaseado
- If you want your cookies to look professional, try to pipe the eye carefully using a steady hand.
Examples
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In the bakery class, we learned to pipe the eye on cupcakes for decoration.
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Can you teach me how to pipe the eye?
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She showed me how to pipe the eye without mistakes.
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She loves to pipe the eye on her cakes!
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To create a cute design, I will pipe the eye on each of the cupcakes.
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During the baking tutorial, the chef taught us how to pipe the eye onto the pastries.
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She carefully pipes the eye on the cake to make it look more appealing.
Surface Forms
Morphology
pipe + the + eye
The verb 'pipe' in baking means to apply decorative icing and 'eye' names a shape; combined with the article 'the' the phrase literally describes piping an eye-shaped decoration. A B1 learner who knows these constituent meanings can readily infer the MWE meaning because it is compositional and follows common verb + noun construction used in culinary contexts.
Etymology
Pipe the eye comes from cake decorating: to pipe is to squeeze icing from a bag and the eye is the round, eye-like shape you make on a cake or cookie. So pipe the eye means 'to decorate' a cake or pastry by adding an eye-shaped icing design.
