Brooki Bakehouse owner, Brooke Bellamy, shares how she turned her iconic recipes into a cookbook

Bake with Brooki contains over 100 recipes. How do you make your own recipes and how did you learn the science of baking?

Trial and error.

I didn't know the science of baking until I started digging into things and asking questions like ‘Why do you add hot coffee or hot water to a chocolate cake?’.

Over time, I learned the answers.

When it comes to adding coffee or hot water to a cake, you add it because it allows the cocoa powder to bloom. From there, I could see the connection between doing that and getting a full-body flavour from the cocoa.

The more I asked those kinds of questions, the more I learned.

The science of baking is kind of a world unto its own, and only when you start making recipes so much do you start asking those questions: ‘Why do you do that? What is the difference between bicarb soda and baking powder?’

You don't understand it until you're doing it.

I also live by the 10,000-hour rule: the more you do anything, the better you become.

So just get in the kitchen and open up my book (out in October)!

What has the cookbook process been like and how is it different from your usual day-to-day work?

It’s been very challenging to readapt my recipes to suit  a  home kitchen.

All my ideas and recipes started in home kitchens, and my love for baking started there. But then once I moved into working in a commercial kitchen, everything got bigger. The mixers are bigger. The quantities are bigger. The blocks of butter are 25 kg instead of 250 g.

The scale of my baking has gotten bigger, and to scale that back was quite a process.

Home baking ovens are also very different to the commercial ovens that we use, so adapting all of those details has just been such a process. It’s been enjoyable to go home and bake at that smaller scale though.

That sounds like a lot of work!

Yeah, it's crazy because there's so much that you need to think of. Baking commercially is just so different from baking at home. So many changes needed to be made in all of the recipes. And since the book has 100 recipes, it was a lot!

While readers eagerly await the book's release, is there a baking secret you can share in the meantime?

Here’s the secret to brownies (actually, there are a couple of secrets):

I talk about this in the book, but whipping the eggs really well gives your finished brownies a nice, crackly top.

Also, the difference between a fudgy brownie and a cakey brownie is just the cooking time. If you can perfect the cooking time of your brownie, that’s how you can achieve the perfect melt-away texture.