The New Year is a new opportunity to trick yourself into thinking you’ll form new habits in the kitchen. You won’t (statistically, you just won’t). BUT. You will buy yourself some fun new kitchen gadgets that will take your meals from everyday to upgrade.

Kitchen gadgets can take over your meal prep space fast and not in a good way. So while there are a plethora of doohickies that claim to save time, cut calories, and trim costs, these five suggestions really do!

KitchenAid 5-Speed Hand Blender

When you’re in a pinch, blend! This immersion blender from KitchenAid (obviously) makes your kitchen a verifiable meal factory. Need a smoothie? Blend it. Need a quick soup? Puree it. Need a salad dressing? Whisk it. With a name like KitchenAid, would you really expect anything else?

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Hamilton Beach Breakfast Sandwich Maker

You know you want one. Is it a unitasker? That’s pretty obvious. But it’s also a life saver. No body wants their drive-thru sammies to come with the guilt of a million unknown calories. With this counter-top gadget, you know exactly what’s in your morning meal and can customize it to taste!

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Easy Lunch Boxes

When you are short on time but big on eating, pack it in with these Easy Lunch Boxes. These keep sliced produce, pre-made sandwiches, and cooked pasta fresh for days, meaning you can meal prep once and eat twice…without double the work.

B. Smith Wood Lazy Susan

Treat your kitchen to a little summin’ summin’ sweet this year. This loopy little gadget will keep your meal time spinnin’ right ’round until you land on what you need. Great for table-top organization or spice-jar rotation.

Kilner Butter Churner

Been watching enough Great British Bake Off to know the difference between butter and butttterrrr. Kilner knows the difference. Get the good milk from the local farm and whip it into a creamy frenzy in ten minutes flat. Paul Hollywood would be so proud.

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5 Kitchen Gadgets that will Upgrade your Meals this Year

Finally, a way to print my breakfast! Created by Miguel Valenzuela, the PancakeBot is a unique batter dispensing system combined with a traditional griddle.

Utilizing compressed air and a vacuum, the batter is dispensed based off a design that’s been uploaded from a SD card. The card also comes with some preloaded designs. In addition, the Pancakebot comes with software unique to the device that allows someone to create a new design.

The software includes options for layering, thus you can control the order in which the lines are drawn. Food coloring can also be added into the mix for splashes of color in the design. This type of device would be ideal for any family with young children, small restaurants that want to get fancy with breakfast or anyone simply obsessed with pancakes.

Expected to retail for $299 eventually, early Kickstarter backers can get in at a $179 price with an estimated shipping date of July 2015. While the project has already doubled the funding goal of $50,000, stretch goals at $250,000, $500,000 and $1 million include different color options, an extra bottle with a large spatula and increasing the number of preloaded designs to 50.

As with all Kickstarter projects, be aware that manufacturing issues of delay the shipping date of the final product by weeks or even months. You can learn more about the PancakeBot in the video below:

Shut Up and Take My Money: PancakeBot Pancake Printer

Easily one of the cutest ways to dress up an ugly USB hub on your desk at home or in your cubicle, this Smoko USB hub has been designed to look like a four-slice toaster.

In addition to using the hub to charge your mobile devices and connect computer peripherals to your system, the USB toaster hub can be purchased with matching toast-shaped USB thumb drives.

Each piece of toast has a little face and personality modeled after buttered toast, rye bread, burnt toast and potato bread. The creator has even named the four drives Butta, Ry Ry, Crisp and Tato.

Each drive has 4GB of space; not particularly impressive compared to other drives on the market. However, it can be ideal for copying and lending out files to co-workers, specifically because they will be more likely to return the drive in order to keep it with the set.

If you were hoping for USB 3.0, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. All four slots on the USB toaster hub are limited to USB 2.0 with speeds up to 480mbps. However, the hub also has an SD card slot.  That could be ideal for dumping pictures onto your computer rather than connecting your digital camera using a USB cable.

At the moment, you can find the Smoko USB toaster hub on sale at Thinkgeek for $11.19. In addition, the drives are on sale for $9.99. You can also find the product on Amazon. Check out a couple more pictures of the USB toaster hub in action:

Shut Up and Take My Money: USB Toaster Hub and Toast Flash Drives