5 oddball kitchen gift ideas for eccentric friends

April 5th, 2012

A conventional gift won’t cut the mustard all the time. That’s because not all your friends have a white picket fence and 2.4 children with a perfectly mortgaged kitchen to match.

Tea towels and toasters will do for that lot but quirky people call for kooky gifts and we have found five that should cover all the offbeat bases.

Gift 1: We’ll ease into the list with a gift for the recently broken-hearted. It’s a knife holder called, The Ex.

The cutting edge knife block is shaped in the red body of a person and it’s supposed to make storing knives “a cathartic experience”! The grossly fantastic accessory is made from heavy duty plastic and has the knife slots already carved within.

It comes with knives and a 25 year warranty (that’s longer than most marriages last).

Gift 2: We love robots at Appliances Online. If they’re not going to rule the world we hope at that one day they’ll clean our house and cook. But in the meantime we can have fun measuring stuff with these Robocup Measuring Cups.

Your friend will love making robo-bread and space cakes with the lovable, stackable plastic cups.

Gift 3: Suggest to your friend that they stick their head in the freezer for a minute, chew gum really fast, stick a slice of bread in their mouth and leave it hanging out OR you could give them a pair of Onion Goggles.

These specially designed spectacles have rubber seals that fit snugly to a face so that onion fumes don’t reach the eyes. Brilliant.

Gift 4: This one’s for the friend who is partial to a tipple. The one who needs a straw to finish the wine off while she/he lays down to rest. Help your friend suck it up with a DIY drinking straw set!

It has 20 flexible connectors and 24 transparent straw pieces to fashion any shaped straw with the ability to include lots of sets of lips!

Gift 5: This one’s a real gag, a hidden octopus in a mug! Who would’ve thought that as they sip their latter that there’s a sea creature lurking at the bottom of the cup! Love.

If these novelty gifts don’t suit your friend, there are more ideas here.

Keri Algar

Having once had to sit on the washing machine to stop it from bouncing into oblivion, Keri is today delighted with the new (smoother running) technologies that make housework easier every day. A self-confessed lazy-bones, Keri seeks out quirky inventions that ease the human workload, such as the robotic vacuum cleaner (wow). And as soon as someone figures out a Jetsons-like self-cleaning house, she will happily lay her pen to rest and retire from appliance journalism. Until then, her pick is a fridge that will tell her smartphone when it's time to pick up more beer on the way home. Magic.