SINGAPORE – Though he is best known for baking strange concoctions like pork cake, chocolate sauerkraut cake and jellied meatloaf on TikTok, B. Dylan Hollis suggests a more normal entry point for new bakers.

Over a Zoom call from Wisconsin, United States, the 28-year-old American social media personality tells The Straits Times: “When I think of entry-level recipes, Betty Crocker cake mix can help you get comfortable in the kitchen. Whether it’s necessary or not, it requires you to mix together dry and wet ingredients and put it into a baking vessel, so you get to actually feel out what it means to bake a cake. It allows you to get quick feedback when interacting with these items.”

He is speaking in front of the iconic red-and-cream kitchen backdrop, familiar to his fans from his videos, filled with shelves of ingredients. His hardcover No. 1 New York Times best-selling debut cookbook Baking Yesteryear (2023) peeks down from a high shelf.

“Banana bread is a great, quick bread. Your bananas go bad? Just stick them in the freezer. I have a whole bunch of black bananas frozen and ready for banana bread,” he adds.

Another easy treat for those with a stand mixer are meringues – egg whites whipped with sugar – baked at low heat to become “little morsels of joy with nothing but two ingredients”.

But he cautions against making them by hand unless one is prepared for an intense arm workout.

He adds: “My biggest advice is to free yourself from these self-imposed restrictions that baked goods need to be beautiful. People set their expectations too high and they’re afraid to fail insofar as it has to look presentable. In baking, half the time your mistakes are edible and you can’t say that about many other trades.”

Though he had little baking experience prior to his first video posted on Aug 29, 2020, in which he made pork cake and declared it tasted like “a good question mark”, Hollis has since amassed more than 10 million followers on TikTok and 1.1 million followers on Instagram.

Known for his high energy and quick edits on TikTok, his chaotic commentary and kitchen antics include using fun names for common ingredients – moo juice, eggies and floofers – and witty jokes in response to zany and unusual recipes.

Hollis says: “People say, ‘Oh, you must have crazy attention deficit disorder’. But, no, I just get really excited about anything that’s old, including recipes. I am a lover of yesteryear. It’s been my favourite word forever, so I’m glad I was able to plaster it on a book.”

His love of yesteryear began in childhood, particularly with big band music. A childhood dream of becoming a big band leader led him to study 1940s big band jazz at the University of Wyoming, an obsolete degree given his current occupation as a content maker and cookbook author.

But music remains a creative outlet and a way of unwinding at the end of the day. During live-streaming sessions on TikTok, he also plays the accordion while waiting for something to bake.

Hollis says reflectively: “I’ve still been afforded my dream to be an entertainer. People often cite a period of their life where directions change quickly and they end up doing something they never thought of before. That’s what happened to me. I didn’t expect to carry the baker’s hat, but I’m happy and honoured and I’m going to run with it.”

Containing 101 recipes from the 1900s to 1980s, Baking Yesteryear is an amalgamation of the videos he has produced since August 2020. Breaking up the journey through the decades are little sections with recipes for desserts with fruit dates, no-bake options as well as the five worst recipes he has tried.

The Bermuda-born baker says: “When it comes to choosing recipes for the book, I live by what I call my three Ws: wild, wacky and wonderful. I think things that are fun are things that are unusual, take unusual routes to get to an end result or do something particularly imaginative.”

Many of the early recipes Hollis filmed himself trying came from vintage cookbooks he collected for fun. Since he went viral, his fans have been sending him old recipe books, many of which came in useful when he was preparing his book.

Collating the most common recipes, he noticed a trend that even during the worst of times in history, people found creative ways to make desserts.

“I used to take them for granted because I can walk into any grocery store and pick up a pie as I go, or get cake mix and have an instant cake. In the 1930s, you have recipes like the peanut butter bread from people who are probably struggling to make dinner every day, and yet they’re still going through this very imaginative process to try and create a dessert out of nothing because they know the power of dessert,” Hollis says.

• Baking Yesteryear is available at Kinokuniya ($43.20, str.sg/cw8p) or Amazon ($35.99, amzn.to/3TpXHag).