Breville TT49

...weirdly excited by my new Breville TT49 toaster? So excited, in fact, that the other day I actually removed it from the kitchen and took it to the bar in order to show it off to my customers.

Could it be the sexy reflective chrome coolwall design that prevents you from burning your hands on the sides of the toaster? Could it be the four slots for holding toast or the way the rack doesn't actually ping up with a crack powerful enough ...
...To compensate for this Breville have fitted a 'warm up' function; simply push the warm-up button for the slices of toast you wish to heat back up and push the handle down, the TT49 will reheat your toast without browning it further. And when the toast is finished the TT49 has a handy high-lift feature which allows you to raise the handle on the rack to lift smaller slices of bread out of the machine without burning your fingers on the elements.
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What can you say that's exciting about a toaster? You can make * toast * exciting, because you can add something to it; you can spice it up with Duck and Orange pâté or you can spread it with marmalades and jams; it's even good with nothing more than butter when you've got a bit of a hangover.. Either way, toast can be made exciting.

But a toaster? They're difficult to make exciting. Small machines that sit in the corner of your kitchen, with either two or four slots (or, if you're really posh, six) and in some traditional white or yellow plastic design or, for the more expensive brands, brushed steel or chrome. Stick the bread in, push the handle down, wait a couple of minutes and then, with a crack, the rack will fling the bread up in to the air, where it'll spin around in a strange toasted pirouette kind of way before landing on the floor, right on the bit where the cat's just licked...

That's about as exciting as toasters get; in fact, they're so dull that some people don't even bother with them, choosing instead to use the grill on their cookers to toast their bread. That's usually more exciting, because if you forget to turn the bread over you can actually set fire to your cooker, if not your home, so there's an element of danger to making your toast and pâté.

So why then, if toasters are so dull, do I find myself getting weirdly excited by my new Breville TT49 toaster? So excited, in fact, that the other day I actually removed it from the kitchen and took it to the bar in order to show it off to my customers.

Could it be the sexy reflective chrome coolwall design that prevents you from burning your hands on the sides of the toaster? Could it be the four slots for holding toast or the way the rack doesn't actually ping up with a crack powerful enough to launch your toast into orbit but instead gently pops the bread up with a whisper when its ready?

No, to be honest, what gets me excited about this toaster is the fact that it looks like a distant relative of R2-D2. Yes, Breville's coolwall design does make this toaster exceptionally safe and it means the little hands of my three year old won't get burned when he's desperately grabbing impatiently at the machine in search of his chocolate spread on toast; and yes, the four slots do make it easier and quicker to prepare a round of toast for the family's beans-on-toast supper - the width of the slots is adjustable to allow for the thicker Hovis Toastie bread that you might prefer and they even centre themselves to ensure even cooking on both sides of your bread; and yes, it comes with a crumb tray to make it easy to clean. All of these things are excellent and cool when it comes to toaster technology, but they're not at all funky or exciting.

What is exciting, however, is that when you switch it on two panels on either side of the front of the machine light up in a Science Fiction cool-glow neon red. Two circular displays show a number that can be adjusted easily by the touch buttons beneath the display (none of your old fashioned twist-and-turn dials here), allowing you to vary the degree of burning you wish to give your bread, but in a darkened kitchen late at night they simply look like two glowing red eyes staring out at you from a chrome head that's trying to hide behind the kettle. Now that is cool.

So what have we got here? Your basic Micromark toaster with a fancy light on either side? Well, no, actually. You've got what can only be described as one of the most technologically advanced domestic toasters money can buy at the moment. Two control panels allow you to toast two slices of bread on the left to one setting and two slice of bread in the slots to the right on another setting. When you push the handle down five red lights light up on the side of the toaster (depending on which side the bread is in) and the lights go out during the cooking cycle so you can see exactly how long the TT49 is taking to make your toast - this is exceptionally handy when the three-year-old is pestering you to tell him how long the toast is going to take. Now he can watch the lights go out himself without repeating "how long how long how long how long" until you feel like thwacking him over the head with the bread.

When the toast is finished the TT49 simply lifts the toast with a quiet 'pop' rather than the traditional firing squad crack and so it's easy to have missed the completed cooking cycle of your bread, returning to the toaster to find it cold. To compensate for this Breville have fitted a 'warm up' function; simply push the warm-up button for the slices of toast you wish to heat back up and push the handle down, the TT49 will reheat your toast without browning it further. And when the toast is finished the TT49 has a handy high-lift feature which allows you to raise the handle on the rack to lift smaller slices of bread out of the machine without burning your fingers on the elements.

The toaster is also fitted with a 'cook-from-frozen' feature, ensuring your toast is perfectly cooked even when it's been in the -23 degree depths of your deep freeze, without you having to try and compensate with the browning function. And if you notice your toast getting a little too brown, simply hit the cancel button and TT49 will just pop your toast up ever so politely.

This truly is one of the cleverest toasters ever, delivered to us by the aliens themselves. How else could it be so good? You're probably sitting there thinking that this toaster costs a fortune, easily in excess of forty quid and bristling with all that technology and those sexy, futuristic good looks, you could be forgiven for thinking so. But you're in for a surprise - the Breville TT49 can be found for as little as £24.99 at Argos, so if the plastic on your Micromark is melting or your Morphy Richards is looking a little dated, get yourself down to the shops and treat yourself to a funky new toaster.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please raise your glasses in a toast to the Breville TT49: the most exciting toaster money can buy. 

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