Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats, Australia’s most powerful recipe blogger, launched an online offensive on Tuesday against Brisbane baking influencer Brooke Bellamy of Brooki Bakehouse, whom she accuses of recipe theft.

Maehashi’s claims were broadcast to her 4.6 million social media followers, and millions of website users, sparking widespread online commentary, think-pieces on the ethics of recipe writing and national news stories. Bellamy, with more than 3.5 million social media followers herself, has denied the charge.

There’s a lot to digest, so here’s a quick run-down of everything you need to know.

Who is Nagi Maehashi, aka RecipeTin Eats?

RecipeTin Eats is Australia’s leading food website, with more than 1500 recipes attracting around 35 million visitors each month. It was founded by Sydney-based recipe writer and Good Food columnist Nagi Maehashi, who made the leap into food media after 16 years of working in corporate finance.

Maehashi’s recipes are known for taking familiar, budget-friendly dishes such as chocolate cake, nachos and fried chicken and meticulously fine-tuning them. Her approach has earned the trust of more than 4.6 million social media followers from across the globe, and her debut cookbook, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, sold 78,000 copies in its first week, breaking the record for the highest first week of sales for a nonfiction title.

Her second cookbook, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight, which sold nearly 300,000 copies in less than three months, was the highest-selling title of 2024.

Who is Bake with Brooki (Brooki Bakehouse) aka Brooke Bellamy?

Brooki Bakehouse began as an online cookie delivery service in 2022 and has since expanded to three bakeries across Brisbane, with international shipping and pop-ups in cities such as Dubai.

Founder Brooke Bellamy, a self-taught baker, rose to social media fame with her “day in the life” TikTok videos, which attracted 2 million followers and earned her a nomination for 2024 TikTok business of the year. Bellamy is known for making thick, New-York-style cookies in flavours such as red velvet and classic choc chip, as well as rich chocolate brownies.

In October, her debut cookbook, Bake with Brooki, became a sell-out success at major bookstores, selling more than 90,000 copies over the past six months. It was the country’s third highest-selling cookbook, with RecipeTin Eats: Tonight at No.1.

Which recipes were allegedly stolen?

Maehashi claims Bellamy’s cookbook Bake with Brooki plagiarised its recipes for caramel slice and baklava from the RecipeTin Eats website. In a statement, Maehashi said: “the similarities are so specific and detailed that calling these a coincidence feels disingenuous”, and it felt like “a slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content”. The recipes appear to contain the exact same ingredients, and the methods are fundamentally the same. Maehashi went on to allege Bellamy had plagiarised the recipes of other writers in Bake with Brooki, but did not include further details.

How did Bake with Brooki (Brooki Bakehouse) aka Brooke Bellamy respond?

Bellamy took to Instagram stories on Wednesday night to deny the allegations of plagiarism and said she had offered to remove both recipes from future reprints of Bake with Brooki. “I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016,” she said, noting Maehashi’s recipe for caramel slice did not appear on RecipeTin Eats until March 2020. Bellamy went on to acknowledge her recipes took inspiration from “other cooks, cookbook authors, food bloggers and content creators”, stating “this willingness to share recipes and build on what has come before is what I love so much about baking … and the community that surrounds it.”

Who else has accused Bake with Brooki of plagiarising recipes?

US-based food blogger Sally McKenney, of Sally’s Baking (formerly Sally’s Baking Addiction), has claimed her recipe for vanilla cake appeared in Bake with Brooki. In a statement posted to Instagram, McKenney thanked Maehashi for “[letting] me know, months ago, that one of my recipes (‘The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had’, published by me in 2019) was plagiarised in this book and also appears on [Bellamy’s] YouTube channel.”

Fans of RecipeTinEats have taken to online forums to analyse Bake with Brooki recipes, uncovering further similarities between Bellamy’s Portuguese tart recipe and Bill Granger’s Portuguese tart recipe, contained in his 2006 cookbook Every Day.

Bellamy has not responded to further allegations of plagiarism.

How does recipe copyright law work?

Ideas, ingredients and methods of a recipe are not protected by Australian copyright laws, so people are permitted to take recipes from external sources and rewrite them in their own words. That said, they are not permitted to reproduce exact physical and digital copies of a recipe without the original creator’s permission. “Generally speaking, if you write a recipe in your own words with your own descriptions, without using the same expression, you are unlikely to infringe copyright,” says the Australian Copyright Council.

What does the publisher, Penguin Australia, say?

Bake with Brooki publisher Penguin Australia denied the allegations, according to Maehashi. In her statement, she said Penguin (via their lawyers) “respectfully rejects your … allegations and confirms that the recipes were written by Brooke Bellamy”. Penguin Australia has not released further comment.