Can you use two present participles in the same sentence? [duplicate]

Question

Which of the following sentences would be correct?

1. Seeing them eating the cake made me hungry.
2. Seeing them eat the cake made me hungry.

The second sentence seems correct to me, but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

Both sentences are fine, and the difference in meaning is minimal. Yet this is the right site for splitting hairs, so here is how Longman.com differentiates the two:

There is a small difference in meaning when a verb of perception is followed by the simple form of the verb, and when it is followed by the -ing form, as in these sentences:

• (a) Before we realized it, we saw a deer run across the road just in front of our car. Thankfully, he got to the other side safely, because we could not have avoided hitting him.
• (b) Before we realized it, we saw a deer running across the road, right in front of us. We put on our brakes quickly and just missed hitting him by an inch, as he leapt quickly out of the path of the car.

Sentence (a) describes a completed action; the observer saw the entire action of the deer's running across the road. Sentence (b) describes an incomplete action; the deer was in the middle of running across the road when we saw him. This sentence could be paraphrased to read: "We saw a deer while he was running across the road."
The simple form of the verb, after a verb of perception, gives the idea that the action was observed from beginning to end during the time of perception...The -ing form of the verb, after a verb of perception, gives the idea that the action is in progress but not completed at the time of perception.

Therefore, we could interpret your sentence 1. as meaning

I got hungry as I was watching them in the process of eating cake, but I did not watch them till they finished.

(and yes it would be a possibility to say eating cake instead of eating the cake, which has something more telic, more final about it. As if you see them eat all of the cake)

Whereas sentence 2. can be paraphrased as:

I watched them eat till they finished the cake. That made me hungry.

However, in everyday speech, no one really thinks of these details. I would look at your examples as at two ways of expressing the same thing. If I had this sentence in a written paper, I would probably use sentence 2, not because 1 is incorrect, but because I would prefer to avoid the undesired consonance.