American restaurant and bakery Outsider Tart has relocated from its former home on Chiswick High Road to a new site at The Lyric Hammersmith. Throughout Halloween and Thanksgiving, find pumpkin-themed treats including its classic deep-dish pumpkin pie, a cloud-like baked pumpkin cheesecake with a fine graham cracker base, and a brand new pumpkin snickerdoodle slice that sees the pie baked into a snickerdoodle cookie crust and topped with cinnamon brown sugar streusel.

Each year, the eccentric duo of New York expats behind Outsider Tart, David Lesniak and David Muniz, celebrate Thanksgiving at the restaurant with ticketed family-style dinners. This year’s feast features no less than 22 dishes, from meringue-baked pecans, rosemary roasted nuts, stuffed grapes, and homemade cheez its to start. They’re followed by roast turkey with sides including cranberry cornbread stuffing, pumpkin mac and cheese, American green bean casserole, corn pudding, sweet potato slaw, and just about anything else diners could wish for. For desserts, guests can enjoy unlimited quantities of apple, pumpkin and pecan Pie, all available for takeaway during the holiday period.

Miso pumpkin loaf cake is back at Burnt Provisions — the outstanding cafe-restaurant on Askew Road serving imaginative brunch and covetable housemade baked goods by day and thrillingly eventide seasonal small plates and natural wines by night. This moist, fudgy loaf cake glows orange with the vibrant flesh of Sussex-grown pumpkins and is topped with a thick ghostly layer of whipped mascarpone frosting that cuts through the sweet-salty intensity of the cake with its cool creamy tang. Chef and owner Finlay Logan has also come up with a darkly-sticky “Pumpkin Pecan-Treacle Frankenpie” that melds two American favourites with a British classic.

Crisp Pizza W6 at The Chancellors is as commonly mistaken for a pop-up as people say “ghosts aren’t real,” but this impressive pizza joint is a permanent part of London’s booming pizza scene. As the name suggests, Crisp makes pizzas of the thin-stretched New York pie variety, taken to a blackened and bubbly leopard-spotted crisp and topped with big-hitting flavour combinations. For Halloween, Crisp has come up with “the Vecna,” named for the Stranger Things villain, topped with double-cooked pepperoni, stracciatella, pecorino, and hot honey from Dr Sting’s.

On Friday 28 October, Crisp and the Chancellors pub is hosting a Halloween Party from 7:30 p.m. until late with live music and DJ and prizes for best fancy dress. Kick things off with a Halloween special “Black Magic Picante” — a black margarita with more hot honey in the place of sugar syrup — though whether this will fan the flames or extinguish the fire of spicy slices of the Vecna remains to be found out. If a stay-at-home spooky movie night is more the thing, call ahead or pre-order online for pick-up.

Gelupo, the gelato parlour from Jacob Kenedy, the chef behind much-loved Italian restaurant Bocca Di Lupo across the street, is widely regarded as home to the best gelato in the city, owing to its punchy modern-classic flavours and constantly changing carousel of hyper seasonal specials.

The autumn harvest menu includes a delectably dense pumpkin and cinnamon gelato, and an intriguing sweetcorn gelato that is smooth, buttery, gently sweet and floral. They glow luminous shades of orange and yellow and taste uncannily of their vegetable: testimony to the talent and dedication of the chefs that spend weeks concentrating the best seasonal produce into mind-bending gelato flavours that sell out in a flash. The technicolour palette of seasonal specials also includes vibrant purple hues of roasted plum and uva fragola, though don’t overlook the paler, more subtle flavours such as ricotta, pear, and toasted wheat. The November menu, meanwhile, will introduce richer flavours like prune and armagnac, alongside zabaione.

The queue of people eagerly waiting to fill their baskets with delicious treats from Aries Bakehouse could easily make it look like the trick-or-treaters had got their dates wrong. The community-based bakery on Brixton’s Acre Lane founded by Jackie McKinson, born to parents of Jamaican heritage and raised in Brixton, occupies what used to be her mum’s sweet shop in the 1980s. It is now home to some of the best bread and pastries in London — with a reputation for dazzling seasonal and weekend specials.

A deep-filled pumpkin pie made with roasted crown prince squash grown by McKinson’s father and intensely sweet Delica pumpkin puree makes an annual return: Riotously flaky crust giving way to a flavour-packed, custardy filling. There is also a pumpkin spice loaf cake with maple cream cheese frosting — moist but not spineless with a crumb that retains some textural intrigue. Pumpkin bagels resemble lifebuoy rings, bright orange with pumpkin flesh and topped with toasted seeds, and in a city where truly great bagels are few and far between, these certainly feel like a lifeline.

Painted Dog Bakehouse is a micro-bakery specialising in exceptional babka and the baked goods that reflect founder Talia Berk’s Jewish-South African heritage. The babka here is visually distinctive from other babkas around, with an intricately layered, tightly twisted structure result in an intense ratio of demi-brioche to rich filling.

For Halloween and Thanksgiving, there is a pumpkin and spice babka with a sticky-sweet filling of brown butter, pumpkin puree, and lots of warming spices, and rounded off with white chocolate and orange zest. The pull-apart structure, poofy-soft crumb and cascading buttery swirls make it impossible to stop at just one slice. More humble in appearance but equally delicious is the ginger honey cake — a simple tea loaf with a moist sticky sponge and honey-lacquered crust. Everything is baked to order and sent overnight for postal delivery throughout the U.K., with a few London stockists like Frank’s Canteen and Melrose and Morgan.

Located in a leafy residential corner of Stoke Newington, Esters has been described the platonic ideal of a neighbourhood cafe. Best known as one of London’s most creative brunch spots serving fermentation-forward dishes, banging coffee and coming up with the likes of a white chocolate miso cookie before that flavour combination went viral, Esters is no stranger to letting imagination run wild.

This year, Esters is offering a pumpkin spice latte using a syrup made with Crown Prince pumpkin puree, fresh ginger leaves, panela sugar for rich butterscotch depths, and the usual spice suspects of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, plus a dash of turmeric. The latte is topped with a fine pumpkin seed sprinkle, and is perfectly complemented by the pumpkin-spiced breakfast scone made with candied pumpkin, Pump Street Chocolate 72 percent dark chocolate, turmeric and hemp seeds from Hodmedods.

Restaurant Eline is a brand new restaurant from former Pophams duo Maria Vivani and Alex Reynolds showcasing French techniques, seasonal produce and natural wines just off Hackney Road. Just two weeks into opening, Eline is already demonstrating flair and distinction with a savoury pumpkin ginger tart inverting the classic American sweet pumpkin pie and refining it with French patisserie precision. Millimetre-thin individual pastry tart cases are baked fresh every service for textural perfection and filled with rich caramelised Delica pumpkin puree, and an unctuous onion fondue of meltingly tender shallots. Each one is topped with a rich golden confit egg yolk that threatens to spill its contents any moment, and finished with fine ribbons of crown Prince squash, pickled ginger, and fresh tarragon for a burst of freshness.

On the dessert menu, there is a sacrilegious religieuse with banana ice cream, peanut gianduja and hot chocolate sauce — forgive us our sins of gluttony and greed — embodied in the French patisserie meant to resemble a chubby nun in her habit. Diners will certainly be knocking on Eline’s doors this Halloween.

E5 Bakehouse, the city’s unconsciously trendsetting organic bakery, is experiencing something of a renaissance as its hyper-seasonal menu that has always celebrated pumpkins and squash this time of year ties in neatly with the pumpkin spice supremacy all over Instagram. Currently on the counter you’ll find classic pumpkin pies on a richly-flavoured einkorn flour and cultured butter pastry crust, filled with a miraculously mousse-like pumpkin pie filling of pumpkin puree made from pumpkins grown on E5’s dedicated farm, along with maple syrup, Ivy House double cream and a heady mix of spices. There is also a savoury, vegan pumpkin pie with crimped edges and a hefty pastry lid, and a vegan pumpkin cake made with rye starter, light spelt flour and Honest Toil olive oil — simultaneously hefty yet light.

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.

Morny Bakehouse on Leyton’s Francis Road is a tiny chocolate box bakery that describes itself as a “modern viennoiserie,” offering creative and imaginative takes on timeless classics. This year’s take on pumpkin pie sees individual sweet pastry cases filled with a spiced speculoos and caramelised white chocolate croquant, topped with a perfectly pumpkin-shaped cut out of baked pumpkin pie crème with a glassy mirror glaze. The combination of flaky pastry and crunchy biscuit pieces lend teeth-chattering crunch, but there is nothing frightening about this uncontroversially delectable flavour combination, unlike some of Morny’s other bakes that creep toward the realm of the absurd even away from Halloween.

Take the “pain au pig,” which sees pork sausage and caramelised onion in the place of sticks of chocolate — whether this is considered a trick or treat depends on where the eater falls on the sweet-savoury pastry spectrum. Even wilder is the “Lip Smacker” cruffin, that oozes blood-and guts in the guise of passionfruit curd and blueberry compote from inside a croissant dough muffin coated with masala-spiced sugar.