How Brooki Started: 41 Square Metres in Fortitude Valley

In May 2022 I opened the doors to Brooki Bakehouse, a tiny 41-sqm bakery in Fortitude Valley. Forty-one square metres is smaller than most people picture. It is smaller than a lot of Brisbane living rooms. There was no seating, no second oven, and no plan beyond making cookies good enough that people would come back.

Before starting Brooki, I had been travelling the world for ten years as a travel writer, fresh out of University. I soon found myself seeking out the best bakeries and sweets in every city, as a sweet tooth has been part of my DNA since growing up in the kitchen with my mum in Tasmania.

Baking has always been my love language. Desserts are the part of the menu I read first (how else would I know how much room to leave!?) 

The queue

What happened next wasn't a strategy.

The cookies were big — 145 grams each, roughly three times a normal cookie — and several of them were injected with a filling, so they oozed when you pulled them apart. That turned out to be extremely well suited to a phone camera. People filmed them. Other people saw the videos and came to Marshall Street to see if it was real.

Then there was a queue. Then there was a queue every day.

It all started on Good Friday in April 2023. After almost a year in business making just enough money to pay rent (but not myself), the queues came. And they came fast. There was a line of more than a hundred customers waiting for me to open the store but with the location of the kitchen, I had no idea they were there. I simply opened the door that day at 8:00am, a day like any other, and the queue didn't stop all day long. The worst part? I was working by myself since I couldn't afford public holiday rates - serving customers, baking cookies and making coffees (but if I recall correctly, no coffees were made that day!) It's a good thing we have an incredibly supportive customer base who could see I was doing my best to keep up, but the caffeine hit would have to be enjoyed at the coffee shop next door.

Selling out most days sounds like a good problem. It is a good problem the way a burst pipe is a plumbing opportunity. We were baking through the night in a kitchen built for a fraction of the volume, and the honest answer to "why do you close at 3:30pm?" was that by 3:30pm there was nothing left. In fact most days, we'd sell out 1-2 hours before closing. Our mixers, freezers and oven capacity couldn't keep up.

What we actually make

Cookies are the thing we're known for, but the case was never only cookies.

There are cupcakes — injected with flavour, topped with buttercream. There are vintage-piped celebration cakes, the ones that get screenshotted and sent to a group chat with "can we get this". There are brownies, cheesecakes, macarons, and the heart cakes that turned into a category of their own. I had no idea that cookies would become our best selling product, but they quickly did just that.

Growing without ruining it

From one kitchen to thirteen locations in three years, which is faster than is comfortable.

There's a flagship on Fish Lane in South Brisbane and another at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast. There's Chapel Street in Melbourne and Barangaroo in Sydney, both opened in August. There are kiosks at Chermside and Chadstone and Pacific Fair, and at the Brisbane, Sydney, Gold Coast and Adelaide airports. There's a cookie vending machine in Brisbane International that runs 24 hours a day, because flights don't keep bakery hours.

And there's a team of more than 200 people, which is the number that still catches me off guard. As a creative person who just loves to bake, I've stepped out of the CEO role willingly, choosing instead to focus on what I love most: developing recipes, creating new flavours and sharing the story as we continue to grow. 

The hard part of growing a bakery is not opening shops. It's that a cookie made in Sydney has to taste like a cookie made in Fortitude Valley, or the whole thing means nothing. We've managed it with ebs and flows, quickly learning the best route to success is in hiring the right people. People who understand obsession with product, attention to detail, trust our customer's feedback is always valuable and want to consistently improve what we're doing every day.

The book

In October 2024, Penguin Random House published Bake with Brooki — a collection of recipes from the bakehouse and my home kitchen and it has since sold more than 350,000 copies.

Writing it meant converting bakery recipes into home recipes, which is harder than dividing by ten. A commercial mixer aerates differently to a KitchenAid. A commercial oven holds heat differently to a home oven. Rebuilding and resetting those recipes became a labour of love, but the major benefit was that all these recipes had long been in the kitchen with me, many of them from my mother's handwritten recipe book. 

It was an absolute dream come true to write my first cookbook. To share the recipes I grew up baking with my mum, my community in Tasmania and long adapted and developed in my first bakery and later Brooki, was a dream come true to put into one collection. I never expected it to become a best seller and I certainly never expected it to spark a career of recipe development, as I now work towards my second published baking book. 

If you want to know what's in it, we've written a full guide to the cookbook — the chapters, whether it suits beginners, and where to buy it outside Australia.

Where we are now

As I type this, we have thirteen locations. A team of 200-plus. A best-selling cookbook. Cookies going out by express post to every postcode in the country, and to New Zealand and parts of Asia.

The kitchen on Marshall Street is still open. But we've moved production to a centralised facility where we can scale our capacity and focus on product quality assurance. It's a work in progress to operate at a bigger scale, but it's a dream to be doing it.

In the foreseeable future we will open our first international flagships in Dubai, London and a city yet to be announced (probably the most exciting one I could possibly dream of). My third baby is on the way before Christmas, which means we will have grown from 1 bakery to 13, no babies to 3, all in the space of a few years. None of it would be possible without the great people we have building Brooki and driving us forward each day. 

The short version

Find a bakery · Every cookie flavour explained · The cookbook · Press