Ice cream is the perfect dessert - it's refreshing, delicious, and goes well with a number of things. There is so much you can do with the cold treat as well, from mixing various flavours to adding a load of toppings. For many, a bowl of ice cream with loads of mix-ins from fruits to chocolates is the way to go.

However, a recipe developer of 20 years has revealed on Tasting Tables how to make the summer treat even better. She revealed that one of her biggest revelations when developing ice cream recipes was to do this simple thing instead of swirling in different add-ons.

Melissa Gaman wrote: "One of the biggest revelations I discovered when developing ice cream recipes was that the best way to thread vanilla ice cream with thick ribbons of jam and big chunks of cookies or cake turned out to be the method involving the least amount of work."

The revelation in question? Simply layering mix-ins instead of swirling it. It "clicked" to her as she watched a video from her local ice cream shop creating one of their signature flavours.

Melissa described the ice cream flowing from the machine to the container, and then being topped with handfuls of chopped cookies and "streamed in sauce letting the flavours build into the ice cream on their own instead of trying to force them together".

She added, "This was the technique I had been seeking, as manually trying to stir everything together either created weak, hard-to-see streaks, or one uniform ice cream with muddied flavours rather than sharp, separate elements."

The recipe developper then took the method and tested it herself, using a few containers of vanila ice-cream and a freezer-safe baking dish.

She said: "I dropped gobs of thick sauce between layers of softened ice cream, and froze the concoction until firm. Swiping an ice cream scooper through the dish created a picture-perfect result bursting with flavour."

So, the next time you're tempted to mix up a load of ingredients into your ice cream, save yourself the trouble, just pop everything on top and let it work its charm.