I have been housesitting for my parents for the last few weeks and it has given me the opportunity to review some of their equipment - my parents are both gadget heads and love having the latest of everything any anything so there are a number of techy type reviews to come over the next few weeks but they had also just invested in a new toaster which I have been using daily and which I have been pretty impressed with.

This is the Tefal 4 slice as shown above, the slots are slanting and facing towards you in such a way that you get a good view of the toasting process - I assume this is the idea, it makes for a pretty large and bulky toaster but obviously this is not a problem in a big kitchen (as it goes this would take up far too much room in my much smaller one).

The slots are actually two seperately operated sets of two slices so you can toast four slices at the same time but on different settings if you so desired or you could just use one set if you were only toasting 2 slices of bread. There is a small dial at the bottom of each lever which allows you to set how much the bread is toasted, I was using it between the 2 and 3 and found this gave the lightly toasted result I was after. I have to say it is MUCH slower than my toaster at home and this surprised me - to toast my bread (or my crumpets on two occassions) it takes a good few minutes. Fast this is not.

Each of the two levers also has a set of 3 buttons, one for popping the toast out early, one for toasting bread from frozen and one which does a quick reheat if your toast has popped out while you were doing something else. I used the reheat button a couple of times as I got bored waiting and wandered off mid-toasting session, it is quite handy. I did not try the toast from frozen function so cannot comment on this.

One minor niggle I had was that both times I toasted crumpets I ended up burning my fingers. This is because although the lever also doubles as a function to slightly lift your bread product out of the slots it does not lift smaller items like crumpets high enough for you to be able to get them without touching the metal on the top/edge of the slots. I therefore resorted to using a knife to fish out my crumpets - which I know is hardly ideal with an electric applicance but was infinately preferable to accidently touching the red hot metal with my knuckles!

This toaster is available for around the £30 mark from Amazon and I actually think it is a pretty good buy as it is durable, reliable and toasts very evenly. For the functionality and the nice design it seems quite a steal at that price. I know you can get toasters for less but considering this is Tefal brand and am eyecatching and easy to use design I would certainly have it in my kitchen if I had the space.

Just be careful with those crumpet fishing fingers!