This all-day Essex cafe next to a garden centre is a scone-fuelled delight

A tipoff to try the Tin Roof Cafe in Maldon came with prior warning: I wouldn’t get a table easily as this all-day spot serving brunch, lunches and sweet stuff from the in-house bakery is constant, scone-fuelled bedlam. Red brick walls, greenery throughout, alfresco spaces, allotments growing fresh veg and herbs. Capacious, family-run, dog-welcoming, pocket-friendly. There’s bubble and squeak with hand-cut ham, Korean-style chicken burgers and a vegan burger called, rather brilliantly, “Peter Egan” after, I’m guessing, the animal-loving actor who played Paul in Ever Decreasing Circles.

Could this place be any more adorable? No, but still, brace yourself. “It’s one in, one out,” I was told. “There’s a seated holding pen at the front where you wait for a table. Stand your ground in there. There’s loads of sharp-elbowed garden-centre folk. I think they’re there for the Basque cheesecake.” Ah, yes, the equally vast Claremont garden centre, just a few steps away. Cake, as we all know, is catnip to gardeners. Sends them daft. Come for 20 litres of alkaline topsoil and a terracotta trough, stay for the seasonal pavlova and thick wodges of billionaire’s shortbread. That’s millionaire’s shortbread with an extra layer of caramel decadence. Clearly real billionaires would never eat this shortbread, as they’re all on longevity hunts fuelled by OMAD (one meal a day), that meal being a posh spin on Trill budgie food.