Wausau Bakers to Appear on "Crime Scene Kitchen"

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023 -- 8:01 AM

(Jamie Rokus, Wausau Daily Herald) When Hannah Reyes, 37, and Kathleen Regelman, 34, do something, they jump in both feet first.

According to Jamie Rokus with the Wausau Daily Herald, that's how the military wives and moms started their own Wausau-based boutique-style bakery business Cup & Cake in early 2021, only a year after Regelman says she baked her first cake.

It's also how they approached purchasing a 60-year-old family-run Wausau bakery less than a year later. And that is how they found themselves competing on the second season of the reality baking competition "Crime Scene Kitchen," which will premiere at 8 p.m. June 5 on Fox.

"You have to be a very specific kind of crazy to do this," Regelman joked. "We did not pursue this," Regelman said of their participation on "Crime Scene Kitchen." Instead, the duo had just taken over as owners of Kreger's Bakery, 1506 N. Third St. in Wausau.

They say they were in over their heads when they got a message on Instagram asking them to participate on the show. "We just laughed," Regelman said. "We get a lot of spam messages, so we didn't think it was real."

But eventually they did reach out to the show producers, and once they heard the women's stories, that they are military wives and moms of a combined seven kids, ranging in age from 2 to 9, and that they had only recently started a bakery with almost no baking experience, "they were intrigued," Regelman said.

The show filmed about a year ago, and the women have been waiting to find out when it would air. "It has been hard to wait this long," Regelman said. Even harder, though, was figuring out how to film a reality TV competition with a new bakery and seven children.

"We had to leave our families. My husband was activated. My daughter was only 1 at the time. My parents moved into my house," Regelman said. "We had a brand-new staff at the bakery, too." They say they were completely unprepared for the experience.

"We have a lot of mixed emotions, but mostly we were stressed out," said Reyes, a Wausau native. "We have been in a lot of stressful situations, but neither of us have done reality TV before, and we went into it blind."

Hosted by Joel McHale, each episode of the reality cooking competition begins at the scene of the crime, a kitchen that was used to make an elaborate dessert that has since disappeared. The chef teams of two are challenged to scour the kitchen for clues and ingredients to figure out what was baked, and then must recreate the recipe based on their guess for celebrity judges Curtis Stone and Yolanda Gampp.

Each week, bakers are eliminated and the winner at the end of the season takes home a $100,000 prize. Reyes and Regelman can't talk about their time on the show just yet, or how they fared, but both women say looking back at the experience, they are glad they competed.

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