In the wake of her “Crime Scene Kitchen” title, Las Vegas baker Natalie Collins-Fish said Friday it’s “surreal” to see the support she’s receiving from her hometown of Palmerton.

The 2004 Palmerton High School graduate is still coming off the high of winning the first season of the Fox baking competition, and $100,000 top prize, with teammate Luis Flores.

“It’s been so cool to have former teachers reaching out to tell me they’ve been watching the show and local bakers telling me what an inspiration I’ve been to them,” Collins-Fish said. “To see everyone from Palmerton rooting for me, I think even if we did terrible they would still have that same response and it’s special to be from a small town that supports you like that. Even though I’m out here in Vegas now, I’m happy I could help put Palmerton on the map.”

Collins-Fish, who bakes about 20 cakes a week in her home for her Cake Lyfe by Nattie J business, was discovered by a casting company and asked to be on the show.

Each week, she and Flores had to scour the “Crime Scene Kitchen,” for clues left behind and then bake the dessert they believed was made there.

At the outset, it was more about getting exposure than it was winning the competition.

“It was really a whirlwind from the time we were contacted until the time we left,” Collins-Fish said. “It’s a new show so we really didn’t know what to expect. Our main goal was to go, stay humble, soak in the experience and trust our talent.”

At the start of each round, teams had just two minutes to look in the kitchen for clues. Collins-Fish and Flores employed the strategy of splitting up, while a lot of other teams stayed close together.

“We would shout to each other the clues we found,” she said. “One of the things that also worked for us was not making a decision on what we were going to bake until the actual bake round started. I find that if you start zeroing in on a dessert while you’re looking for clues, you’re going to get stuck on that one thing and you might miss something.”

One of the hardest parts of being on the show, Collins-Fish said, was keeping the outcome a secret until Wednesday’s finale. That included her 5-year-old son Landon, who told his mom she couldn’t come home unless she won.

“It was hard keeping it from him,” she said. “He knew we made it until the end, but we actually told him that they filmed everybody winning and that they were only going to play the real winners on television at the end. He was so excited though and into every episode.”

The show ended Wednesday with teams having to use the clues found in the kitchen to make a birthday cake for judge Yolanda Gampp, a well-known cake artist.

For the winning piece, Collins-Fish and Flores made a three-tier cake.

“It was such a weight off my shoulders with that last bake knowing that we had more freedom to do what we wanted,” she said. “Up until then, you may have baked a really great dessert, but if it wasn’t exactly what was under that box, you could go home. That was very hard for me being boxed in like that.”

The top tier on their final bake was a vanilla confetti cake with raspberry buttercream, topped with an individual slice of birthday cake and candle.

The second tier featured a lemon blueberry cake coated with vanilla Italian meringue buttercream.

The bottom layer was devils food cake with chocolate folded into it, a bananas Foster filling and a caramel diplomat cream.

The team added coffee to the chocolate cake to intensify the flavor.

Though it blew Gampp away, it almost didn’t come to be.

“When we went to judging, the cake was slightly leaning and I had a full-blown meltdown,” Collins-Fish said. “I almost threw it in the trash. It was just about a half-inch off, but that’s just the perfectionist in me.”

Gampp, after tasting, would go on to say she needed a “moment alone with the cake.”

The announcement of the winning team was filmed late at night, Collins-Fish said, and the moment took a while to sink in.

“I was totally caught off guard because with the cake leaning I had convinced myself we didn’t win,” she said. “It all just happened so fast. The fireworks started going off and I asked Joel McHale, ‘is this real,’ and he said, ‘yeah, it’s real.’?”

With the prize money in hand, Collins-Fish and Flores hope to fulfill the dream of opening their own bakery in Las Vegas. Don’t look for it in the next couple of months, however. Both said they want to make sure they do it right.

“It’s in the works, but we don’t want to be one of those places that’s open for a year or two and then shuts down,” Collins-Fish said. “We’re not going to rush it just because we won. We want to make sure everything is lined up right.”

While Palmerton fans hoping to taste something out of the Crime Scene Kitchen champs’ kitchen are going to have to head to Sin City for now, all hope isn’t lost for an option closer to home.

“I’m staying in Las Vegas,” Collins-Fish said with a laugh when asked about starting a bakery in Palmerton. “Maybe somewhere down the road I can think about having something to get a presence there. I won’t rule it out.”