Is the Brooki Bakehouse empire about to crumble?

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Bellamy wrapped up her blog in 2021, the year she turned 30. In a post titled “Goodbye to travel” she wrote about loving every minute of her jet-setting twenties, but admitted “the turn of a decade has forced me to audit my life thus far”.

“My thirties will be about creating myself,” she wrote. “This is less about starting over as it is about taking stock. Seeing where I started and how far I’ve come since then. A momentary pause to reflect on a decade past. And an invitation to myself to start over anew.”

Brooki Bakehouse is born

When this masthead interviewed Bellamy in 2023, she said that after the pandemic, she moved from Tasmania to Brisbane, which is where she turned her love of baking into a career.

“I’m a self-taught baker turned bakery owner,” Bellamy writes on her website, Brooke Bellamy.

“I’ve always loved baking. Growing up in a small town, I would spend my weekends and time after school whipping up a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies with my mum, always eating more than my fair share of cookie dough along the way.”

Bellamy opened Brooki Bakehouse, a 42-square-metre space inside the Stewart and Hemmant building on Marshall Street, Fortitude Valley, in May 2022. She has also referenced opening her first bakery in 2016, the same year she published World of Wanderlust.

“I turned my love for baking into my full-time career when I opened my first bakery,” she writes on her website. “The long 15-hour days in the kitchen would pass by quickly as I was learning along the way, always willing to try new things.”

Brooki goes viral

Bellamy has been open about the bakehouse’s early struggles. “In all honesty, the bakery was not successful before I started sharing these videos,” she said.

The videos she refers to were “day in my life” reels, snapshots of the local baker preparing arrays of cookies, cakes and macarons. They shot Bellamy to viral fame, amassing more than 3.2 million views and catapulting the humble bakehouse into an epic success.

“To see people come in-store saying they loved the videos and then translating into customers was a real pinch-me moment,” she told this masthead.

That momentum – the snaking queues around the block on weekends and cult online following – has only intensified.

In August last year, Bellamy teamed up with coffee giant Nespresso to launch a limited-edition cookie in boutique stores around the country, designed to pair with a signature blend of the company’s coffee.

A month later, she announced her first expansion store at Brisbane Airport’s Domestic Terminal. Toby Innes, the head of commercial property at Brisbane Airport, spruiked the “kilograms of Brooki delights” that would be boarding flights to more than 60 locations around Australia and dozens of locations around the world.

Bellamy gave birth to her first child on the same day the Brisbane Airport store opened. Her book, Bake With Brooki, went on sale a few weeks later in October.

The cookbook became an instant bestseller and Bellamy has since launched a product range that includes a “Brooki”-branded apron and hoodie. She’s also taken her signature desserts further afield, with a month-long pop-up store in Abu Dhabi, and one earlier this year at Westfield Chermside.

The plagiarism claims

At the centre of the claims are recipes for two popular desserts: caramel slice and baklava. A side-by-side comparison shows stark similarities between the recipes published in Bellamy’s book and those by Maehashi. The RecipeTin Eats founder says the resemblances “are so specific and detailed that calling these a coincidence feels disingenuous”.

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A second baker, US-based cook Sally McKenney, has since come forward, claiming her recipe for “The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had” has allegedly also been copied. “Original recipe creators who put in the work to develop and test recipes deserve credit – especially in a best-selling cookbook,” McKenney wrote on Instagram.

In a statement posted on Brooki Bakehouse’s Instagram story, Bellamy said: “I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book, which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years, since falling in love with baking as a child and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen.

“In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016 … as was communicated in the first point of contact I received.”

She went on to say RecipeTin Eats published a recipe in 2020 using the same ingredients as her recipe, which she had been making and selling since 2016. She added that she had offered to remove both recipes from future reprints to prevent further aggravation.

Bellamy is not renowned for her vanilla cake, caramel slice or baklava, and rarely, if ever, sells these in her bricks-and-mortar store. Her popularity has been driven by her take on the humble cookie, nailing an indulgent, chunky style with a crunchy exterior and a soft, gooey centre. The bakehouse also specialises in a range of brownies, cupcakes and macarons.

What’s next for Brooke Bellamy?

In some corners, the fallout has been swift. As the claims circulated, so did a heavy backlash across Brooki Bakehouse’s social media platforms, with disgruntled users posting a flood of negative comments and reviews.

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Others have continued to support Bellamy, including one customer outside her Valley store on Wednesday morning. “We’re still here to try the cookies and take the book home,” they said.

Before these allegations, Bellamy was on a trajectory that looked certain to continue exploding. She’s been an enormous commercial success and had plans to continue expanding her dessert empire.

It’s unclear where the celebrated baker goes from here if the plagiarism claims prove true, but should she successfully defend her reputation, here’s hoping the damage to Brisbane’s dessert darling isn’t permanent.