Carrot cake is the dessert that most adults pretend not to want and then eat two slices of. The dish is structurally a quick bread — oil-based, leavened with baking soda, studded with carrot, walnut, sometimes raisin or pineapple — and finished with a cream cheese frosting that, if done well, has the bright acid the cake itself does not.
Lindsey Farr is a former executive pastry chef who is currently in the bakery-cafe phase of opening her own Manhattan room. The transition from someone else's pastry program to your own bakery is the chef-pivot that produces the most refined version of a few specific desserts. Carrot cake is almost always one of them.
Bobby's version, per the broadcast, was technically correct and emotionally generic. Hers wasn't.