Morphy Richards Clarity Soup Maker review: the gadget every soup lover needs

You can't beat a hot bowl of soup on a cold day. My wife and I get through loads of it; it's something of a go-to lunch while we're working.

And we've always liked to make our own. By choosing the recipes, we can tailor the recipe to what we have left over, what we'd like in terms of thickness and flavour, and how interested we are in stepping on the scales at the end of the week.

But we're busy people. And chopping, blending, and cooking up ingredients takes time we'd rather spend going on a nice walk and working up an appetite for, well... A bowl of soup.

So I was delighted to be asked to test out a dedicated soup maker by the nice people at Morphy Richards. I can't believe I've never tested one before, actually, because it's the perfect gadget for soup lovers with little to no time on their hands.

The Clarity 1.6l Soup Maker is essentially a kettle with a very clever lid. The jug has a heating element that takes care of the cooking, and the lid has a blender that deals with the ingredients.

The theory is simple, you bung in your ingredients, fill it up with some stock, press a few buttons, and it gets to work.

In one programme, it heats everything up to a fizzing crescendo, then the blender gets to work whizzing it into a soup. And it can get through all its stages in just over 20 minutes.

For us, this means we can set it running and it'll have our lunch ready to pour out in the time it takes to finish a video call.

Amazingly, it lives up to this promise brilliantly. We've tried various recipes now, from a polished Italian tomato-based soup to a complete voyage of discovery using what was left over from a roast dinner, and they've all been delicious.

The controls sit on the top of the device, and there aren't many of them. You choose how thick or thin you want your soup, and whether you actually want heat. Because it can also make smoothies or yoghurts.

There's a handy "keep warm" function, which is useful if a meeting overruns or we get sidelined at work, and there's a self-cleaning mode - although this isn't always 100% effective, and it's not dishwasher safe.

What I really love about it, though, is its simplicity. Rather than having to go through several different steps to make a soup, you just lob it all in a machine and it's done for you. The time it takes is impressive, but it wouldn't actually matter if it was a slower process, because you just leave it to do its thing.

Part of me wishes it had a slightly larger capacity than 1.6-litres because, while Morphy Richards reckons that's enough for four portions and, I'll admit, it is, they seem to underestimate how much we like soup. We never have quite enough soup to make four full servings.

But that's actually fine, because it's such a quick job to whip up another batch that we usually just do two runs and we end up with a week's worth of lunches. And it takes less than an hour to prep that.

The cheapest price I've seen for the Clarity Soup Maker is on Amazon, at £88.99, but it's worth looking out for some Black Friday deals because it's likely to see a discount.

But even at this price it's such a lovely thing to have in the kitchen, and we honestly use it all the time. We haven't used the blender or the slow cooker since we've been testing it, and we've enjoyed some of the best soups we've ever made.

If you've been toying with the idea of buying a soup maker, just do it. And I can certainly recommend this one. It's superb.