Even though I love to bake, I didn’t plan to open a bakery.

I planned to travel. To see everything, eat everything, collect enough experiences to fill a life that felt genuinely lived. Being this inquisitive started from a young age, having grown up on the island of Tasmania and living what had been a pretty quiet life. There was something inside of me that wanted to “experience life like it was in the movies” and so I always dreamed of travelling the world to experience it firsthand.

By the time I was in my mid-twenties I had visited more than 80 countries, made possible by a travel blog I started writing in my early twenties to document my adventures.

At times I thought I’d be a nomad forever, but somewhere along the way something shifted. I kept thinking about food. Not restaurants or travel meals — the specific, particular magic of something baked. The way a perfect cookie can make a room feel like home. The way people’s faces change when they bite into something extraordinary. I came home with a notebook full of recipes, a head full of ideas, a few classes in patisserie in Paris and absolutely no clue how I’d turn this into a viable business.

In May 2022, I opened Brooki Bakehouse in a 41 square metre shop in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. It was tiny. It took everything I had to open the doors. And for the first eight months, almost nobody came.

I won’t romanticise that period. It was genuinely hard — the kind of hard that makes you question every decision that led you there. I’d left a career that was working, spent my savings, and was standing behind a counter in a beautiful little shop that the world had completely failed to notice.

So I picked up my phone and started filming.

The first video was nothing special. Just me, the bakery, a day that looked a lot like every other day — flour on my apron, early mornings, the particular chaos of running a small food business alone. I posted it to TikTok because I had nothing to lose. It went viral overnight.

What followed was one of the stranger and more wonderful experiences of my life. The queue that had been nonexistent was suddenly around the block. People flew in from interstate. Messages arrived from the Netherlands, from the Dominican Republic, from countries I’d visited on my travels but never expected to reach back. Brooki Bakehouse went from a struggling small business to something I genuinely didn’t have a word for — a phenomenon feels like too large a word and too small a word simultaneously.

I kept filming. I kept baking. I kept showing up every day to a business that was now showing up for me in return.

The community that built itself around Brooki over the next few years — now more than four million people across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — is something I think about constantly. These are people who watched from the beginning, who sent messages at 2am saying a Brooki cookie recipe got them through a hard week, who queued for hours at new store openings because they wanted to be part of something. Building a business is one thing. Building something people genuinely love is another thing entirely, and I don’t take it lightly.

In 2024 I published Bake with Brooki — a cookbook that went to number one on the Australian bestseller list within 24 hours of being available for pre-order. By the time it published, my book had found its way into homes across the world. I receive messages about it from India, from Greece, from the United States, from people who hunted down a copy from a store three cities away because they wanted it that much. That still makes me stop whatever I’m doing and feel something I can’t quite name. Disbelief, maybe. Immense gratitude, for sure.

Bake with Brooki has now sold more than 250,000 copies and will soon be published in the United States and United Kingdom. It’s a relief to know there will be more Brooki followers around the world able to get their hands on a copy, after thousands of DM’s and emails questioning where to find a copy outside of Australia (it’s been selling out ever since it published —truly incredible).

Brooki Bakehouse now operates across multiple locations in Australia, and in 2025 we began expanding internationally — a journey that has taken me to foreign countries, backed by a $25 million investment that still feels somewhat surreal to type. The 41 square metre shop in Brisbane feels like another life. It also feels like the whole foundation of everything that came after it.

I am currently writing my second book and building out the global side of the business, which means most days involve equal parts spreadsheets, creative decisions and logistics, the particular joy of developing a new flavour and the particular exhaustion of running something that operates across time zones and hemispheres.

I share all of it — the wins, the chaos, the lessons learned expensively — because that’s what I would have wanted when I was standing in an empty bakery wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake. Nobody builds anything alone, and the least I can do is be honest about what building it actually looks like.

If you’re here because you love baking, welcome. If you’re here because you’re building something of your own and wondering if it’s possible — it is. I promise you it is.

Thanks for being part of this.

— Brooke x