The viral candied fruit recipe sending kids to hospital
By Tony Moore
Children are coming into Queensland hospitals suffering burns from hot sugar syrup and melted plastic after copying recipes going viral on TikTok.
Three similar cases have been admitted to the Queensland Children’s Hospital in South Brisbane in the past month, with doctors across Australia and New Zealand counting at least 15 children burned while making a popular candied fruit recipe and similar DIY recipes.
Violet Higgins, 12, has a dressing removed from her burned foot after making candied fruit in her home microwave.Credit: Chris Hopkins
While most of the 1300 patients seen by the QCH burns unit each year are toddlers, the children copying the TikTok videos are primary school-aged or adolescents.
Professor Roy Kimble, the hospital’s director of burns and trauma, says children are using plastic containers to heat sugar in microwaves for up to eight minutes.
“It is not just melting the sugar, it is also melting the plastic containers,” he said. “You can just see a disaster coming from that.
“With hot sugar, you don’t need much contact time to get a very deep burn. You get burns so severe they require grafting. And that has certainly happened here.”
Roy Kimble (far right) and his team at the Queensland Children’s Hospital have seen three similar cases in recent weeks.Credit: Tony Moore
Violet Higgins, a 12-year-old student from Shepparton in regional Victoria, said she hadn’t expected to end up in hospital while making a candied fruit recipe she had learnt from TikTok.
The year 7 student had made the recipe for tanghulu before, by putting sugar and water in a plastic bowl and then in the microwave.
But one Saturday afternoon she was left screaming when hot syrup melted through a plastic bowl and landed on her left foot.
“I was screaming because it was burning so bad,” Higgins said. “My mum came rushing, and she ripped it [the crystallised syrup] off my foot.”
Violet was following a candied fruit recipe called tanghulu when hot syrup landed on her left foot.Credit: Chris Hopkins
After the crystallised syrup was peeled off by Violet’s mother, Rebecca, she was taken to hospital where she received treatment for burns to her toes.
For the past four weeks, Violet has been using crutches to get around. Luckily, she did not have to undergo skin grafting.
“I didn’t think something like that could happen because no one showed [on TikTok] that something could go wrong,” she said.
Kimble said parental supervision in the kitchen was important, but it was impractical to always be watching teenagers learning to cook independently.
While acknowledging it would be difficult, he suggested TikTok include warnings that highlighted the risk of burns.
“We need to make people aware of the impact of these videos,” he said.
Melbourne University social scientist Lauren Rosewarne said children needed to be equipped with skills to discern whether a social media challenge or video was realistic to replicate.
“Ask kids to think about what the goal of these videos are. They just want clicks; they are not there to help you cook in a safe way, and it’s the same way for adult content,” Rosewarne said.
“Their difference is that kids are simply consuming more of this content than adults and there’s a compound factor. It’s a volume issue.”
Rosewarne also said health authorities were facing a losing battle to raise awareness about these issues stemming from social media as trends come and go faster on apps such as TikTok.
“The attention span or the half life of these trends is so quick that by the time you write the article and by the time I comment on it – it’s moved on,” she said.
With Najma Sambul