Great ExpeCaketions cake pops made by Sarah Fox, 15, of Prairie Village, Kan.

Cake pops — those colorful dipped and decorated golf ball-sized rounds of cake on a stick — are everywhere. They’re popping up at school functions and weddings, birthday parties and baby showers.

There are books about cake pops, classes and YouTube videos.

Even Starbucks sells them.

Popularized by a blogger known as Bakerella ( www.bakerella.com), cake pops have taken over as the new cupcake. In her New York Times best-seller, Bakerella shows readers how to craft cake pops that look like robots, koalas, puppies and ghosts.

The classic cake pop is a super-sweet and mushy mouthful. In its original form it is made of finely crumbled cake and frosting creamed together, chilled, then dipped in colorful candy melt and decorated. In the last few years they’ve become an international sensation, and many cities are going cake-pop crazy.

In Prairie Village, 15-year-old Sarah Fox, a freshman at Shawnee Mission East High School, has started her own cake pop company called Great ExpeCaketions. A local business has started to sell them.

Great Expecaketions is no sidewalk lemonade stand. It’s a real company complete with a website (www.greatexpecaketions.com), Facebook page, professional pictures and logo. Sarah’s pops are even for sale at a local business — Social Suppers in Corinth Square — for $1.60 per pop.

So how did a teenager who can’t even vote start her own company?

She had a little help from her parents.

“She’s got a dad in sales and a mom with a marketing background,” Sarah’s mother, Sylvia Fox, said. “We heard about cake pops from a friend in St. Louis who had mentioned them on her Facebook page. That was in early January. I told Sarah, because she likes to bake, and she’s an artist of sorts.”

Sarah made more than a hundred cake pops the Sunday before Valentine’s Day for her 11-year-old brother’s school party. They were a hit. But not right away.

“A lot of the kids thought it was a chocolate lollipop,” Sylvia Fox said. “And by Valentine’s Day you’ve had so much chocolate that it doesn’t seem that special. But then I said to them, ‘Hey, there’s cake on that stick!’ They were all like, ‘Oh, I love cake!’ But it was also interesting to see the mothers. (Some) had never seen (cake pops) before. They thought it was great that Sarah had made them.”

“It’s going great,” her mother said. “We told her the other day, ‘You’re almost in the black, which is incredible for less than three months.’”