SPOILER WARNING: This story includes spoilers for the finale of Fox‘s “Crime Scene Kitchen” Season 3.
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 didn’t land their $100,000 victory, thanks to their own personal preference in types of chocolate.
For the first bake of the finale episode, they made Meyer lemon pistachio domed tartlets with lemon mousse on top, a dark chocolate and pistachio ganache — despite not seeing dark chocolate in the Crime Scene Kitchen — and lemon curd insert.
It was then revealed that the actual dish they were supposed to have baked was lemon pistachio domed tarts including a crispy pistachio pastry crust filled with pistachio ganache, topped with a dome of lemon mousse with a lemon curd insert covered in a white chocolate yellow mirror glaze.
“Oh, man, we got inside our heads so bad,” Johnson told Variety. “They exclusively told us, not only will you be judged on how close it is, but it will also be on your overall execution. And we’re like, oh, execution has never mattered before. So like, let’s make sure that we’re executing everything perfectly all the time. And Jessica and I made a decision based on our own palettes. We were like, nobody in their right minds would put a white chocolate ganache in a tart. And yeah, they would. We decided to go in another direction and it was the wrong one.”
Contestants Lenore and Jessica in “Crime Scene Kitchen.”
Christos Kalohoridis
But the competitors came back around in the final mystery dessert of the season, when they bested their fellow finalists — Janusz Domagala and Keiron George Murphy, and Daniel and Becky Rosales — with an almost exact match for the unveiled a two-tier orange semolina olive oil cake covered in Italian buttercream filled with orange curd and a square bottom tier covered in iced sugar cookie tiles, and the entire cake topped with a modeling chocolate orange blossom.
Even though the semolina flour perplexed their competitors, Johnson and Harrison committed to the ingredient.
“In the second bake, we stuck to our own guns so hard and we only did what we saw, even though it was contrary to what we tasted and what we believe to be true,” Johnson said. “We’re like, it doesn’t matter.”
Despite their “rogue ingredient” of dark chocolate in the first bake, judges McHale, Yolanda Gampp and Curtis Stone decided Harrison and Johnson were by far the most consistent in both their baking detective work and execution during the “Crime Scene Kitchen” Season 3 closer.
“I would say, even in the finale and throughout the entire season, trying to get out of our own heads,” Harrison said. “Both being business owners and being able to run and make decisions, having somebody else take the wheel and be like, no, actually, you’re going to do it this way and these flavors. It was really hard to be like, no, you might want to do your own thing, but you can’t do that, because that’s not the point of the game.”
