But the project is driven by his outsider’s fascination with culinary traditions a lot of Americans take for granted. He said that during the pandemic he started messing around with TikTok and one day pulled out an old cookbook he had laying around and picked the weirdest thing in it to try and bake (it was the pork cake). And earlier videos on his TikTok show him experimenting with music content. It took a bit of adapting to, but it was fantastic.” And it was a good decision, because I’ve loved it,” he said.
He was born and raised in Bermuda and said he wanted to move to the polar opposite of Bermuda for college. Hollis said that part of his fascination with weird American food history is because he’s not American. “It tastes like aggressively sweet fruit salad put into lime gelato,” he yells angrily at the end, admitting that it tastes pretty good as long as you don’t think too much about what’s in it. It also came out rock-hard and made him vomit.Įarlier in 2021, he made a 7UP Jell-O salad, which, if you’re curious and have a high tolerance for stomach-churning descriptions, seems to mostly consist of mayo and 7UP soda. In the video, Hollis said it looked like barbecue sauce and smelled like death. Dylan Hollisīut his videos aren’t just fun - they’re a genuinely fascinating work of experiential food history, like his video from earlier this year where he made a “ration cake” recipe from the ’40s.
I’m just having a great deal of have no words for what came out of the oven #baking #vintage #cooking #cake ♬ original sound - B. I haven’t a clue why what I’m doing is working. You know, that idea of no dead air, constantly speaking, these things.
“I look highly to the radio of the 1930s, the 1940s. “I’m a bit of an old-fashioned person,” he said. Alternating between droll quips and cartoonish overacting only to break character when the recipe goes wrong (or right), it makes all of his videos feel like a Marx Brothers film on 2x speed. But it’s not just the editing that’s overwhelming. If you’ve never come across one of Hollis’s videos before, you’ll note the sheer volume of information he packs into each one, condensing the prep, cooking, and tasting of each recipe into the span of a minute or two. He also conceded that he has probably become a better baker since he started his video series. And luck, I suppose.”īaker or not, his account has grown to over 7 million followers on the app. “I hadn’t baked until TikTok it was just happenstance, boredom. I have no experience as a baker,” he told Eater. All of which he’s made - and taste tested - with enthusiasm. His journey into the bizarre and confounding recipes of America’s past have led him to noxious-sounding concoctions such as tuna salad Jell-O, a water pie from 1929, and potato doughnuts.
Since that first baking video, Hollis has transformed himself from just another TikTok user into a well-known face across multiple social media platforms. Then Hollis takes a bite and says enthusiastically to the camera, “it tastes like a question mark. For the curious, a pork cake is made with dates, molasses, nutmeg, and, of course, pork.
Tick tock tiktok cake series#
Dylan Hollis quickly and animatedly runs through the recipe in a series of quick edits. In that particular video, which was uploaded in August 2020 and has now been viewed over a million times, a young man named B. Depression recipes hit different #fyp #baking #foryou #vintage #cooking #cake ♬ original sound - B.