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An engineer has come up with an invention takes seconds off the chore of cutting perfect toast soldiers. When the hand-held cutter is pressed against a slice of bread, it creates a series of precisely placed perforations.

Once the bread has been toasted to perfection, the soldiers can be torn off ready for dunking in a soft-boiled egg. The perforator is the brainchild of Mike Minton, a 37-year-old electronics engineer, who says the ideal soldier should be 22mm wide.

"I love egg soldiers but the one thing I hate is cutting up the toast, because it is fiddly, messy and time consuming," he said.