(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “Crime Scene Kitchen.”)
“Crime Scene Kitchen” wrapped its first season on Wednesday, crowning the top dessert detectives in an hourlong finale featuring not just one, but two major twists.
The four final teams — Luis and Natalie, Leslie and Emma, Thomas and Cathy and Lorie and Jason — were first tasked with a high-stakes dessert round in which the worst-performing team would be eliminated on the spot. After missing a tricky toothpick clue, Lorie and Jason and Leslie and Emma made chocolate napoleons rather than using traditional puff pastry and landed themselves in the bottom.
Leslie and Emma’s structural issues were deemed more problematic than Lorie and Jason’s too-thick puff by the judges, and the mother-daughter duo were consigned to a fourth-place finish.
The final showpiece round saw the remaining teams baking a birthday cake for judge Yolanda Gampp. But rather than replicating an existing dessert, the teams were allowed to bake and design their cakes however they wanted, as long as they used the assigned ingredients. Luis and Natalie produced a pink fondant-wrapped cake with multi-flavored tiers; Lorie and Jason baked a blue and white marbled cake also with a variety of flavors; and Thomas and Cathy turned in an austere chocolate cake with plain white frosting.
Luis and Natalie, whose over-the-top birthday cake nearly knocked Yolanda off her feet, were crowned the winners at the end of the episode, taking home the $100,000 prize.
“It was so hard for both of us, but especially for me, the whole season,” Natalie said in an interview with TheWrap. “He had to rein me back so much. They don’t show a lot of it, but he was like, ‘We cannot put glitter on everything. We cannot put a crazy rose on everything. It’s not going to be under the box.’”
Read more of TheWrap’s interview with the winning duo here.
