Classic Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

People often ask me why I switched from being a four-star-restaurant pastry chef to making pastries in a bakery. If I could give them only one example of why, it would be a slice of this carrot cake. Restaurant desserts are like the popular kids in high school: beautiful, dressed up, suave, well put together on the outside . . . and on the inside sometimes they are truly wonderful and sometimes they still need a little more work. Bakery pastries, on the other hand, don’t hide inside a fancy