Kitchen Gadgets Review: The Egg Cuber

In the first of a new weekly column, our gadget guru puts a square egg-maker to the test. Does it work and, more to the point, why would you want square eggs?

What?

The Eddingtons Egg Cuber (£5.50, Amazon), a compressible, right-angled enclosure in which eggs may be compacted into cube shape.

Why?

So they fit better in sandwiches? I don’t know. Look, either the idea of a square egg excites you or it doesn’t. Like art or Disneyland or Calum Best, there is no practical reason for it.

Well?

“Consider God’s handiwork: who can make straight, what He hath made crooked?” These words, from Ecclesiastes, pose a pertinent question. With this week’s abomination, the answer is: anyone. “Put a round egg in … and get a square egg out!” boasts the box. Geometrically, this is wrong on both counts because we’re talking about ovoids and cubes, but there’s no point being pedantegg.A peeled, warm hard-boiled egg is a surprisingly malleable thing. Simply pop one in the plastic cage, place the pressing plate above it and turn the screw top to completion. The whole thing feels like a medieval torture device to terrify hens. The egg is squashed down, refrigerated for an hour to set the flesh, and lo! emerges tamed. Proud ovoid transmogrified to small, clammy cube.

The cubed egg emerges.Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Guardian

I can report that it works. It is harder to explain why you would want to do it in the first place (perhaps my more enthusiastic colleague can enlighten me). The packaging reminds us that square eggs are “more stable on the table” and “less common than round”, so at least they have a sense of humour.

Perhaps the appeal is in the very unnaturalness? God does not want you to eat an equilateral egg, which makes it a forbidden fruit, and there is nothing sweeter. But the creamy, die-shaped monstrosity in my hand isn’t sweeter. It just tastes like an egg in a form that, had you eaten it a few hundred years ago, would have had you drowned as a witch.It is as much use as a coffee table for a puffin. Also, the portmanteau of square eggs is squeggs, and does that sound like something you should be eating? Consign Egg Cuber and its freakish progeny to hell.

Redeeming features?

Square egg sandwiches.Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Guardian

Cheap, easy to wash, will probably win you some points with children. The chunky, see-through orange casing looks very much like a roadwork lamp, in case you are keen to recreate the “stolen traffic equipment” decor of your student days.