"Hearth Bakery is a social enterprise bakery in Hackney Wick offering a hyper-seasonal menu of regeneratively farmed baked goods, breakfast and lunch. Accordingly, pumpkin is all over the menu whilst it is in season, with every part used in a series of imaginative zero-waste creations including pumpkin spice lattes, spiced pumpkin turnovers and pumpkin seed cookies. A house-made pumpkin spice syrup made by blending the innards and pressing away the juices is used in the lattes, and also brushed over spiced pumpkin turnovers whilst they’re still warm from the oven. Exceptionally friable puff pastry encases a fudgy filling of heritage gourds from Shrub Provisions, cooked down in brown sugar and spices. Every mouthful is an explosion of leafy pastry flakes and autumnal flavours, impossible to resist. Hearth’s pumpkin seed and oat cookies, meanwhile, are the lovechild of a flapjack and pumpkin pie, made by blitzing pulp and seeds and combining with oats, butter, sugar and eggs to create a teeth-sticking cookie dough that is robustly wholesome and only subtly sweet — a delicious rebellion against the artificial pumpkin spice flavour." - Emma Louise Pudge