SPOILER WARNING: This story contains spoilers for Fox’s ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’ season 3 finale.
The Confectionator 3000 has spoken: Canadian baking duo Jessica Harrison and Lenore Johnson are the winners of Season 3 of Fox’s mystery baking competition “Crime Scene Kitchen.”
But the pair, who were revealed as the third season winners on Thursday’s finale episode of the Joel McHale-hosted series, almost missed out on their $100,000 win, thanks to their own personal preference in types of chocolate.
For the first bake of the last episode, they made Meyer lemon-pistachio dome tarts with lemon mousse on top, a dark chocolate and pistachio ganache – despite not seeing any dark chocolate in the Crime Scene Kitchen – and a lemon curd insert.
It was then revealed that the actual dish they had baked was lemon pistachio dome pies, including a crispy pistachio dough crust filled with pistachio ganache, topped with a lemon mousse dome with a lemon curd insert covered in a white chocolate yellow mirror glaze. .
“Oh man, we got in our heads so bad,” Johnson said Variety. “They told us exclusively that you will not only be judged on how close it is, but also on your overall execution. And we say, oh, the execution has never mattered. So let’s make sure we always execute everything perfectly. And Jessica and I made a decision based on our own palettes. We were like, no one in their right mind would put white chocolate ganache in a cake. And yes, they would. We decided to go a different direction, but it was the wrong one.”
Participants Lenore and Jessica in ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’.
Christos Kalohoridis
But the competitors bounced back in the final mystery dessert of the season, when they defeated their fellow finalists – Janusz Domagala and Keiron George Murphy, and Daniel and Becky Rosales – with an almost exact match for the two-tiered orange semolina-olive oil reveal. oil cake covered with Italian buttercream filled with orange curd and a square base covered with icing sugar cookies, and the whole cake covered with a sculpting chocolate orange blossom.
Although the semolina flour confounded their competitors, Johnson and Harrison were committed to the ingredient.
“On the second bake, we stuck so hard to our own guns and only did what we saw, even though it was contrary to what we tasted and what we think is true,” Johnson said. “We say: it doesn’t matter.”
Despite their dark chocolate ‘rogue’ on the first baking, judges McHale, Yolanda Gampp and Curtis Stone decided that Harrison and Johnson were by far the most consistent in both their baking detective work and performance during the ‘Crime Scene Kitchen’ season 3 finale.
“I would say, even in the finale and throughout the season, trying to get out of our own heads,” Harrison said. “Both as a business owner and being able to lead and make decisions while someone else takes the wheel and says, no, actually you’re going to do it this way and with these flavors. It was very difficult to say, no, you might want to do your own thing, but you can’t do that because that’s not the point of the game.