When I prepare my favourite green tea steep it, and go back to the computer, I regularly get sidetracked and forget about the tea.
But no more.
Here is a great new Gnome applet called Timer Applet provided by Jimmy Do.
It is really The Applet I was looking for. And he even provides an Ebuild for easy installation on Gentoo Linux!
[Note] At the time of writing, this ebuild file was in dos format and thus didnt install. The developer was informed. In the meantime just emerge dos2unix and use it :)