After a meteoric rise to success, is this Brisbane baker’s empire about to crumble?

She’s the star baker who turned her struggling bakery into a viral sensation and cookie empire with little more than a TikTok account and an aptitude for cutting reels.

But as quickly as Brooke Bellamy, the founder of Brisbane’s Brooki Bakehouse, shot to meteoric success, she’s now seeing her hard work crumble under accusations that recipes published in her cookbook Bake With Brooki were stolen from other chefs.

Bellamy and her publisher, Penguin, deny the allegations brought forward by RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi, who claims Bellamy plagiarised her caramel slice and baklava recipes.

Brooke Bellamy opened her viral Fortitude Valley bakery, Brooki Bakehouse, in May 2022.Credit: @brookibakehouse

In a statement, Bellamy defended the 100 recipes included in the book as being created over many years. “In 2016, I opened my first bakery,” she wrote. “I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.”

Who is Brooke Bellamy?

To really understand why the allegations have caused such a stir, you need to understand where the baker’s rise came from.

Before becoming a bakehouse sensation, Brooke Bellamy (then Brooke Saward) enjoyed a transient life, travelling the world as an early adopter of the now mainstream digital nomad lifestyle. In 2012, she launched World of Wanderlust, a blog inspiring “young people to travel more, and to travel solo”.

It was a huge success and from it, she created her own “Travel Blogger Master Course”, outlining steps to become a successful paid travel blogger.

In 2016, Bellamy, then 24 years old, published her book World of Wanderlust with Penguin Australia, featuring snippets from her travels through Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Oceania and the Middle East.

This is also when she opened her first baking business, Charlie’s Dessert House, in her hometown of Launceston. She sold the bakery to her parents, Tania and Kent Saward, in 2020 and moved overseas to live in Africa indefinitely.

When the pandemic struck, Bellamy spent eight months trying to get back to Australia, eventually spending most of her savings to get a flight home.

She 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.”

Brooke Bellamy is renowned for her chunky cookies.Credit: Brooke Saward

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.

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”.

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.

The fallout from the plagiarism claims has been swift. It’s unclear what comes next for Brisbane’s celebrated baker. Credit: Neesha Sinnya

“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 opening her Launceston bakery. 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.

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 further expand 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.

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