Big Mistake. Huge.

Likely by now, you know that Jeanne and I were eliminated on last week’s episode of Crime Scene Kitchen. We started our television adventure with only two goals: 1) to completely be ourselves, no matter what…and 2) to not be eliminated in the first round. Now, I haven’t watched any of it but all the feedback from far and near suggests we were pretty on brand to our in-store selves AND we made it to the fourth round, so goals accomplished.

So here’s the backstory of our final episode:

Crime Scene Kitchen is actually significantly harder than it looks. And remember,. we had been quarantined in the hotel for long periods of time between filming days. We had watched enough Youtube videos on pastries to be completely dangerous….though largely ineffectual. And when we saw the hazelnuts scattered in the showpiece crime scene, all we could think was that we knew dacquoise was made from a hazelnut meringue. (Also, please note that neither of us had heard of a dacquoise prior to going to California. And we weren’t allowed to eat what we baked by show rules, so we’ve still never eaten a dacquoise. Sounds right.)

So anyway, the whole croquembouche thing flew right by us. We didn’t know what one was and making cream puffs filled with hazelnut pastry cream LITERALLY NEVER ENTERED OUR MINDS. In retrospect, if we had known just how wrong we were in our guess, we would have made a White Chocolate Strawberry pie, served it up to Curtis Stone, and gone out in a blaze of glory. But dang it, we thought we might have been correct with that dacquoise.

I will say that as the other teams presented their croquembouches (croquebouchi?) and some struggled in their construction, we had a little hope that our successful dacquoise could reign over a subpar croquembouche. But alas, no luck. And that’s fair enough. We are some self-taught pie baking girls and we were getting in over our heads. Our elimination was no surprise. Oh, and after you are eliminated on a reality television show, you film that part at least six more times…so it wasn’t as awkward as I presumed it might be. (Though I bet that makes it 1000% worse on a show like The Bachelor, wouldn’t you think?)

We were sad, solely because we were having so much fun together - and fun with Joel McHale, who Is just the best in real life. But we had our family and PJP to get home to and world pie domination waits for no one, so we couldn’t be too terribly sad.

We will tell you our most closely held secret though. We were required to stay three days after elimination before we were flown home. Quarantine in the hotel was expected, but we figured…what’s the worst that could happen? So we snuck out of the hotel and into an Uber, heading straight to Hollywood for a two hour open air bus tour. We just couldn’t spend a month in California and NOT see the Hollywood sign at least. We took the tour, decided those two hours were all we needed of Hollywood, took an Uber back to the hotel, returned to our rooms…and flew LAX to COU the next day. Our clandestine journey to Rodeo Drive will forever be one of my favorite memories. It’s perfectly us and a perfect end to our journey onto television. Though nowhere once did we see a croquembouche for sale. Or a dacqoise. And Jeanne decided Beverly Hills wasn’t near as beautiful as Boone County, so there’s that…