Celebrating ADOT’s 50th Anniversary with cake… and concrete

This year marks 50 years since the Arizona Department of Transportation became an agency in July 1974. And what better way to celebrate an anniversary than with cake?

Many of our coworkers in the materials lab have told us that making cake is a good analogy for making concrete, so we made a video to show you how. Plus, we just love an excuse to have cake.

In many recipes for baked goods, the instructions say to combine dry ingredients such as flour, baking powder and salt to create a dry mix to set aside for later. This is similar to cement mix, one of the main ingredients used to make concrete.

Our recipe then called for combining butter and sugar. We cut up the stick of butter to make it easier to mix. In pieces, it is similar to coarse aggregate, or bigger rocks, while sugar has a similar texture to fine aggregate, or smaller rocks/sand.

The eggs represent admixture, which is sometimes added to concrete mix to help it bond together, and milk represents water. Mix those together with the dry mix and you have concrete! But we're not quite done yet. Sometimes concrete also includes additives, which can change the characteristics of the final product. Similarly, we added vanilla to flavor our cake.

After baking and cooling, both cake and concrete are ready to decorate. While ADOT crews use paint for things like lane striping, we opted for frosting and a whipped-cream and sprinkles "50." We made a video of the entire process that you can watch below.

Thank you for helping us celebrate our 50th anniversary, and here's to 50 more years of getting Arizonans safely home.

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