5 Funny Kitchen Tools You'll Buy as a Joke and Actually Use

Nobody asked for this. Nobody knew they needed it. Nobody is giving it back.

The history of kitchen tool design is largely a story of restraint — clean lines, ergonomic handles, neutral colors, forms that follow function without drawing unnecessary attention to themselves. Somebody, at some point, looked at this entire design philosophy and decided it was missing something. That something, it turns out, was a ceramic human face that separates your eggs through its nostrils. The result is an object that manages to be simultaneously the most unsettling and most effective egg separator currently available to the home baker, a product that raises serious questions about the person who invented it while also making you deeply grateful that they did.

The mechanism is straightforward and deeply committed to its own bit. You crack your egg into the ceramic bowl of the face — which is already a sentence that requires a moment to process — and then tilt it gently forward. What follows is the egg white making its exit through the two nose holes, draining cleanly into whatever bowl you have positioned below, while the yolk remains behind in the face, cradled and intact, completely unaware of the indignity that has just occurred around it. From a purely technical standpoint, it is an excellent separator. The drainage is controlled, the yolk stays put, and the whole operation is cleaner and more reliable than many tools that do not involve a ceramic face at all. The fact that it is also profoundly bizarre does not diminish its performance. If anything, the commitment to the concept seems to have sharpened it.

What nobody tells you about this egg separator is that it permanently changes the kitchen experience for everyone who witnesses it in action. The first time you use it in front of another person — a partner, a housemate, a family member who came in to ask if you needed help — there will be a pause. A silence in which they process what their eyes are reporting. Then a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a complaint. Then, almost inevitably, the words "why do you own this." And you will not have a fully satisfying answer, except to gesture at the clean, separated egg white draining efficiently into the bowl below, and let the results speak for themselves. It works. It works so well that getting rid of it afterward feels like a step backward as a person.

That is the real trick of this product — it starts as a joke and ends as a kitchen staple. People receive it as a gag gift, laugh at it, put it in a drawer, then pull it out the first time they need to separate eggs and never put it back. It earns its place not through charm alone but through genuine, repeated usefulness, which is the highest standard any kitchen tool can meet. The fact that it meets that standard while also making everyone in the room slightly uncomfortable is simply a bonus — a small, daily reminder that the best kitchen tools do not have to be boring, and that baking, when done with the right equipment, can be a genuinely memorable experience from start to finish.

Your spoon deserved better. The crab agreed.

For most of culinary history, the spoon rest has been a humble object. A flat ceramic disc, maybe a small tray, something shaped vaguely like a leaf if the manufacturer was feeling ambitious. Its job was simple and its presence unremarkable — a place to put the spoon so the counter stayed clean, fulfilling its function without drawing attention or inspiring any particular feeling in the person using it. This was, in retrospect, a failure of imagination. Because it turns out that the spoon rest did not need to be boring. It needed to be a small red crab, clinging to the edge of your pot with the focused intensity of a professional who takes his responsibilities very seriously and would like you to know it.

The Crab Spoon Rest works exactly as advertised, which is to say it holds your spoon cleanly and keeps your counter free of drips and residue in the way that all spoon rests are supposed to. But it does this while also perching on the rim of your pot like a tiny kitchen supervisor who has strong opinions about your seasoning choices and is not afraid to make his presence felt. He is red. He is committed. He is gripping that spoon with the energy of someone who was given one job and has decided to treat it as a calling. The counter stays clean. The crab stays vigilant. Dinner gets made under proper supervision for what may be the first time in your cooking life.

What this product does to the atmosphere of a kitchen is genuinely difficult to anticipate until you experience it. Cooking, on an average weeknight, is a task — something to get through efficiently so that food can exist and the evening can continue. But something about the crab changes the register of the whole operation. Pasta becomes slightly more cinematic. Soup feels like it is being prepared for an occasion. The act of reaching for your spoon, having it handed back to you by a small ceramic crustacean clinging to the edge of the pot, introduces a theatrical quality to the proceedings that a flat spoon rest simply cannot provide. Guests who wander into the kitchen mid-cook notice it immediately, because nobody expects to encounter seafood-based supervision while marinara is happening, and the surprise of it is delightful every single time.

It is also, quietly, one of the best gifts you can give to anyone who cooks — not because it is expensive or elaborate, but because it is the rare kitchen object that improves the experience of cooking itself rather than just the outcome. It is practical enough to use daily, funny enough to mention unprompted, and sturdy enough to outlast every trend in kitchen decor that will come and go around it. If something is going to hold your spoon — and something has to hold your spoon — it might as well do it with personality, with presence, and with the particular brand of dramatic commitment that only a tiny red crab perched on the edge of a pot can provide.

It doesn't just cut pizza. It commits to the cut.

Most pizza cutters live in a drawer. They come out, they do their job, they go back in — anonymous, unremarkable, a tool that exists purely in service of the pizza and has no identity of its own beyond that. This is a reasonable way for a pizza cutter to exist. It is also, now that the bicycle pizza cutter has entered the conversation, a slightly sad one. Because it turns out that cutting pizza does not have to be a neutral, forgettable act performed by an object with no personality. It can be an event. It can have stakes. It can feel, for the fifteen seconds it takes to wheel a tiny bicycle across a freshly delivered margherita, like something worth doing with full commitment and genuine theatrical energy.

The bicycle pizza cutter is exactly what it sounds like and somehow still more than you expect when it arrives. The wheels are the blades — two circular cutters positioned exactly where the wheels of a bicycle would be — and the act of rolling it across a pizza is so satisfying and so visually absurd that it tends to stop conversations mid-sentence. It cuts well. The blades are sharp, the rolling motion is smooth, and the slices come out clean in the way that actually matters when food is involved and someone is hungry. But the cutting is almost secondary to the experience of watching it happen, because nothing about Friday night takeout prepares you for the sight of a tiny bicycle aggressively completing the Tour de France across your dinner.

What separates this from a novelty item that gets used once and forgotten is that it earns its keep through repeated, genuine usefulness combined with a presence that refuses to be ignored. It does not belong in a drawer. Putting this pizza cutter in a drawer feels like a moral failing — like benching the most interesting player on the team because the game is technically already won. It lives on the counter, or on a small display stand, or propped against the backsplash where it can be seen and appreciated between performances. Guests spot it and ask about it. Children demand to be the one who uses it. Adults who consider themselves above novelty kitchen tools pick it up, roll it across the nearest flat surface, and immediately understand why it exists.

As a gift for anyone who owns a pizza cutter — which is most people — this is the upgrade they did not know they were waiting for. It is the kind of object that makes a person look at their old pizza cutter with something approaching pity, not because the old one was bad, but because it never once made dinner feel like a competitive sport. Pizza night is already a good night. Add a tiny bicycle racing across the surface of your food with the focused intensity of an athlete who trained for this specific moment, and it becomes something slightly more — funnier, more memorable, and exactly the kind of small, ridiculous detail that makes an ordinary evening feel worth talking about afterward.

It holds your spoon. It lifts your lid. It has thoughts about your technique.

There is a specific type of supervision that cat owners know intimately — the kind that offers no assistance, no encouragement, and no feedback beyond a look that somehow communicates both mild disappointment and complete indifference simultaneously. The cat does not help. The cat does not need to help. The cat simply positions itself in a location of maximum visibility and observes, with the quiet authority of a being that has decided its presence alone is contribution enough. If you have ever cooked dinner while a cat watched from the counter with that particular expression, you already understand exactly what the Cat Spoon Rest is and why it exists. It is not a product that required explanation. It required only execution.

The design is committed in the best possible way — a small gray cat, clinging to the rim of your pot with its front paws hooked over the edge, back legs dangling, expression hovering somewhere between watchful and unimpressed. It holds your spoon in place between uses, keeping the counter clean in the way a spoon rest is supposed to. It also props the lid slightly open when needed, allowing steam to escape without you having to hover over the pot yourself, which means the cat is — technically, functionally — doing more for your cooking process than most cats have ever voluntarily done for anyone. It has taken on responsibilities. It is handling them with the energy of someone who agreed to help but wants you to know it is doing you a favor.

What makes this spoon rest resonate so deeply with anyone who has shared a home with a cat is how accurate it feels. Cats already supervise cooking. They appear on counters uninvited, position themselves directly adjacent to whatever you are doing, and watch with an attention that feels evaluative rather than curious — as though they are forming opinions about your knife skills and finding them adequate at best. The ceramic version of this experience is, if anything, slightly more helpful than the real thing, because it holds the spoon and does not knock anything off the counter. It captures the entire essence of cat energy — present, watchful, faintly judgmental, completely unbothered — and makes it functional. This is a design achievement that deserves more recognition than it typically receives.

As a gift it works on practically everyone, because the audience for a tiny cat clinging dramatically to a pot with an expression of quiet disapproval is enormous and crosses every demographic. Cat owners will feel seen in a way that is immediately funny and slightly too real. Non-cat owners will still get it, because the idea of being supervised by something small and opinionated while attempting to cook dinner is universally relatable even without firsthand feline experience. It is the kind of kitchen object that earns a permanent spot not just because it does its job, but because it does its job with personality — holding your spoon, lifting your lid, watching your every move, and silently reserving judgment on the pasta situation until the final results are in.

Functional. Dishwasher safe. Aggressively gothic.

Somewhere along the way, kitchen design made a decision. Cutting boards would be rectangles. Occasionally, if someone was feeling adventurous, they might be an oval. The wood grain would be visible. The edges would be clean. The whole thing would sit on the counter communicating competence and practicality and absolutely nothing else, because the kitchen was a place for function, not feeling. This was a reasonable decision. It was also, in hindsight, deeply unambitious. Because the cutting board did not have to be a rectangle. It could have been a bat. It could have been a full, dramatic, wing-spread bat sitting on your counter like a sentinel of the night who has chosen, for reasons that are entirely its own, to assist with dinner preparation.'

The Bat Cutting Board functions exactly as a cutting board should — the surface is solid, the grip is stable, and it handles vegetables, herbs, fruit, and garlic with the same efficiency as any board that has not committed to a specific aesthetic. But it does all of this while spread across your counter in the unmistakable silhouette of a bat at full wingspan, which transforms the act of chopping from a mundane kitchen task into something that feels vaguely ceremonial. Onions become more interesting when diced on a bat. Garlic, already a vegetable with gothic associations, reaches its full dramatic potential when minced against a wing. Even a simple afternoon snack — cheese, crackers, some fruit — takes on an atmosphere when prepared on a surface that suggests you do your best work by moonlight.

What this cutting board understands, that most kitchen tools do not, is that the experience of cooking is shaped as much by the objects involved as by the food being prepared. A rectangular board says: this is a task, complete it efficiently. The bat says: this is a moment, and you are the kind of person who approaches even a Tuesday night dinner with a certain commitment to the aesthetic of the thing. It attracts a specific type of kitchen personality — the person whose decor might be described as slightly spooky but dishwasher safe, who finds standard kitchen equipment a little too emotionally stable, who has looked at the available options for food preparation surfaces and felt, quietly but persistently, that none of them were quite right. For that person, this bat is not a novelty. It is a correction.

As a gift it is one of the more inspired choices currently available for anyone who cooks, decorates, or has ever described their personal style as somewhere between cozy and ominous. It works for Halloween and for every other month of the year, because good gothic kitchen energy is not seasonal — it is a lifestyle. It will sit on the counter between uses because putting it in a cabinet feels like a waste of its potential, which means guests will notice it, comment on it, and leave with a slightly different understanding of who you are as a person. Functional tools are good. Functional tools with full dramatic bat wings and a dishwasher-safe finish are clearly, objectively better. The garlic agrees.