Published March 1, 2007.
The traditional seven-minute icing recipe was a little too sweet and thick for our taste, and it required holding a hand-held mixer longer than was comfortable. So we started by cutting the amount of sugar in our icing recipe. We learned that if we first heated the mixture to at least 160 degrees and then transferred it to a stand mixer for whipping (rather than holding a hand mixer for seven minutes), our new seven-minute icing recipe was just as billowy and shiny as the old-fashioned version.
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