Influencer Brooke Bellamy has broken her silence regarding allegations that she knowingly plagiarized recipes in her 2024 Bake With Brooki cookbook.
“I do not copy other people’s recipes,” Bellamy, 33, told Us Weekly in a Wednesday, April 30, statement. “Like many bakers, I draw inspiration from the classics, but the creations you see at Brooki Bakehouse reflect my own experience, taste, and passion for baking, born of countless hours of my childhood spent in my home kitchen with Mum.”
She added, “While baking has leeway for creativity, much of it is a precise science and is necessarily formulaic. Many recipes are bound to share common steps and measures: if they don’t, they simply don’t work. My priority right now is to ensure the welfare of the fantastic team at Brooki Bakehouse and that of my family.”
Bellamy’s book, Bake With Brooki, was originally published in October 2024. Less than a year later, a pair of food writers alleged that some of Bellamy’s content was deliberately copied from their own works.
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“This is a story about a multi-million dollar cookbook by a social media influencer, published by a blue-chip publisher, featuring numerous recipes that, in my opinion, are plagiarized, given the detailed and extensive word-for-word similarities to mine and those of other authors,” Nagi Maehashi wrote on her “RecipeTinEats” blog on Tuesday, April 29. “To me, the similarities between the recipes in question are far too specific and detailed to be dismissed as coincidence.”
She claimed, “I’m speaking up because staying silent protects this kind of behavior. Profiting from plagiarized recipes is unethical — even if it is not copyright infringement — and undermines the integrity of the entire book. It’s a slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content rather than cutting corners.”
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Maehashi specifically alleged that her Caramel Slice recipe is nearly identical to the one Bellamy printed in her cookbook.
“While recipes can resemble one another, because there are only so many ways some recipes can be made, the precision and detail in the similarities in this case are, in my opinion, far too strong to be a coincidence,” Maehashi stated. “I can tell you the exact moment in my life that triggered the creation of this recipe — how and why it came to be, and what I tried before deciding that I had figured out The One.”
“Sally’s Baking Addiction” blogger Sally McKenney also claimed that her vanilla cake recipe was excerpted in Bake With Brooki.
“Nagi, you know how much I admire and support you — and I’m so grateful you let me know months ago that one of my recipes (The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had, published by me in 2019) was also plagiarized in this book and also appears on the author’s YouTube channel,” McKenney wrote via social media earlier this week. “Original recipe creators who put in the work to develop and test recipes deserve credit — especially in a best-selling cookbook.”
Random House Australia, which published Bellamy’s book, has not addressed the accusations. Us Weekly has reached out for comment.
