Recipe for disaster as Australian cooks in plagiarism debate due to come face to face next week

7NEWS

04-05-2025

Google 'caramel slice recipe' and thousands of results will appear.
Dozens of them claim to have the 'best' or the 'easiest' recipe, most list varying quantities of flour, butter, sugar, condensed milk and desiccated coconut and some ingredient lists, somewhat controversially, feature golden syrup.
The popular slice, found on sale at hundreds of election day fundraising cake stalls on Saturday, was at the centre of an ugly food fight between two high profile cooks over allegations of plagiarism and breach of copyright.
In one corner, is the wildly popular Nagi Maehashi. The darling of the home cooking scene's Recipetin Eats website has spawned best-selling books and a social media following in excess of five million.
In the other is Brisbane baker Brooke Bellamy, whose Bake With Brooki cookbook became a bestseller after it was published by Penguin in October last year.
Ms Bellamy became a global sensation after sharing 'day in the life' videos on TikTok, which receive millions of views each day. She is best known for her cookies and has opened pop-up stores in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Ms Maehashi ignited a furore on Tuesday when she posted a series of slides to her Instagram account, accusing Bellamy of plagiarising two of her recipes, a caramel slice and a baklava, in Bake With Brooki.
The author claims she first raised concerns with Penguin in December.
'I put a huge amount of effort into my recipes. And I share them on my website for anyone to use for free,' she said.
'To see them plagiarised (in my view) and used in a book for profit, without credit, doesn't just feel unfair. It feels like a blatant exploitation of my work.
'To me, the similarities between the recipes in question are so specific and detailed that calling these a coincidence feels disingenuous.
Ms Maehashi said profiting from plagiarised recipes was unethical and a 'slap in the face for every author who puts in the hard work to create original content rather than cutting corners.'
Hours after the allegations, Sally McKenney, author and blogger behind Sally's Baking Addiction, levelled similar claims about her vanilla cake recipe.
Then on Thursday, Ms Maehashi said Ms Bellamy may have copied 'virtually word for word' the late Bill Granger's recipe for Portugese tart from his 2006 cookbook.
'It is so blatant to me that the wording in the method part of the recipe is copied almost exactly. To me, it is the biggest and strongest example of plagiarism that I have seen by this author,' Maehashi told east coast media.
Ms Bellamy, who owns the popular Brooki Bakehouse in Brisbane, denied the accusations, saying she had been making and selling her recipes before Ms Maehashi's were published.
'I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years,' she said.
'In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.'
Ms Bellamy posted an image showing her caramel slice, which dated back to December 2016.
'On March 2020, RecipeTin Eats published a recipe for caramel slice. It uses the same ingredients as my recipe, which I have been making and selling since four years prior,' she said.
The Brisbane baker said she 'immediately offered' to remove both recipes from future reprints to prevent further aggravation'.
As debate erupted across the Australian culinary scene, the two continued to trade barbs via social media statements.
On Wednesday, Ms Bellamy said she was deeply distressed by the allegations and had been attacked online.
'I do not copy other people's recipes. 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 said.
Ms Maehashi released another statement on her Instagram page on Thursday, alongside an image of a direct comparison of the directions for caramel slice recipe that shows only small differences.
'I tried for almost 6 months, going back and forth with Penguin/Brooki. I hired lawyers,' she wrote.
'I also did it knowing it would open the doors floodgates to haters, and no control over what the press will say.
'I have nothing to gain out of speaking up except that I believe it's the right thing to do.
'I do not want their money. I didn't even ask for reimbursement of legal fees.'
By Thursday evening, the nature of the ensuing debate on social media prompted Ms Maehashi to post a video imploring people to stop attacking Ms Bellamy online.
'Now, I know I've made serious allegations, but this does not justify the personal attacks that I've seen online against Brooke Bellamy. I do not support it, and I'm asking you to stop,' she said.
Ms Bellamy also lost a role as an ambassador for the Federally-funded Academy for Enterprising Girls.
Throughout the week other high profile Australian culinary personalities weighed in, with cookbook author Adam Liaw — who has a background in intellectual property law — saying no recipes in the world would reach the standards necessary to obtain patent protection.
'It used to happen to me a lot when I did YouTube,' he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
'I'd make something I'd been cooking since I was a child and suddenly there would be 10 other YouTubers making the exact recipe with the exact ingredients. I wouldn't get too worried about it: if someone wants to take a specific number of grams from a recipe I wrote, then fine, be my guest.'
Each day brought more fallout. Ms Bellamy found herself dropped as an ambassador as federal initiative Academy for Enterprising Girls, while Ms Maehashi then found herself facing criticism when celebrity chef Luke Mangan told The Courier Mail she failed to credit him properly for a recipe in one of her cookbooks.
'She has credited my recipe, but I would have preferred a bigger mention and at least linking people to our website,' he said.
The accusations have prompted discussion around whether a recipe can ever be owned, and the line between imitation and inspiration.
According to the Australian Copyright Council, copyright does not protect ideas, information (such as ingredients and quantities) or styles, methods or techniques.
The council said a recipe can only be protected by copyright if it is original, or if it is put into material form.
'Therefore, if you write your own description of how to make a soufflé, this 'literary work' is protected by copyright, even though you did not invent the combination and proportion of ingredients and the method is not new,' the council said.
Specialist intellectual property lawyer Dave Stewart, from Perth law and litigation firm Bennett, said copyright was not a good mechanism for protecting recipes.
'There is an absence of novelty that occurs in respect of most recipes. You'd have to have something quite extraordinary that is captured in material form,' he said.
Mr Stewart said the question was more around ethics, as opposed to legality.
'To take recipes from someone and replicate them seems iffy, even if it's not an issue from a legal perspective or copyright perspective, it just doesn't smell right,' he said.
'I'm not sure at all what Nagi could do in respect of any sort of legal avenue to stop Brooke Bellamy from copying the recipes, but it seems to me she's doing a pretty good job of embarrassing Brooke Bellamy.'
The issue is expected to come back into the spotlight next week with Maehashi's RecipeTin Eats book and Baking with Brooki both shortlisted in the same category at the Australian book industry awards in Melbourne.