"Top Chef Just Desserts" news and stories

Though she didn't display the bells and whistles of her fellow competitors, Pasadena, California's Danielle Keene waded through the Top Chef Just Desserts battlefield by honing in on one thing: nostalgia. Whereas other chefs were concerned with flash-in-the-pan techniques, Danielle quietly did her thing, only taking time out to tell the more annoying cheftestants to shut their pie holes. A graduate of the Los Angeles Culinary Institute, Danielle currently owns and operates Bittersweet Treats, a pastry company that provides the Los Angeles area, as well as Internet customers, with homemade cakes, candy and ice cream.

Slashfood spoke with Danielle about her time spent on Top Chef Just Desserts, her homemade root beer and the one thing everyone is asking about.

Considering the contestants you were surrounded by, how did you not commit any violent crimes in that house?

DK: [laughs]. It was close. Very, very close. When I came back to the house, I had two things: pool and a puzzle. I'd just sit there and do my puzzle and tune everybody out. Then I'd go back to my room -- luckily I'd remembered to bring pictures with me, so I'd look at people out there who loved me.

Continuing Slashfood's reality-tv cooking competition exit interviews, we present you a conversation with the winner of Top Chef Just Desserts. To avoid spoilers, click through to read the winner's final thoughts. On Monday, our interviews with the runners-up.

Just Desserts wound to a close this week. As it did, we found ourselves reflecting upon the newest spate of celeb-chef wannabes -- and feeling a strange sense of deja vu.

Was it that they reminded us of the Top Chef peers that came before them -- Hung? Ilan? No, not in the slightest. Maybe they called to mind all the dessert crazies on TLC and Food Network: The Cake Boss, Duff, all the high-strung yokels on Ultimate Cake-Off? Not exactly.

And then it struck us: The whole season of Just Desserts has been a giant, extended high school flashback. Especially if you were at all involved in drama club.

There was the jock (Morgan). The showtunes spaz (Zac). The cynical, almost-goth chick (Danielle). The straight-A perfectionist (Heather H.). The boy next door (Yigit). The basket case (Seth, how we missed you). And given that three diametrically opposed personalities ended up in the finale -- Yigit, Danielle and Morgan -- we can't help but think the producers played into those adolescent stereotypes, just a little.

Say what you will about Top Chef: Just Desserts -- it's not predictable. Sure, for a few weeks we were worried. A couple of chefs went home exactly when they should have and not a moment sooner. (Heather H., we knew your stubbornness would do you in!) We didn't want normalcy. We needed more instability, more drama, more turmoil.

After all, it all started off like a reality show set in an asylum -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, but with petit fours instead of pills, aprons instead of straitjackets. But as we inch toward the big finale, "Just Desserts" is resembling nothing so much as an Agatha Christie mystery: Who keeps killing off the best chefs? And who's next?