I have a sense that I'm probably missing something really obvious, but is there a quick/simple way to make block shadows for type in Illustrator (v10)? Or a plugin that will do it?

At the moment I'm creating a blend between two offset type objects, expanding the blend, ungrouping and then merging all but the top layer of the blend. But this method creates a lot of unnecessary points and is just generally kind of awkward and time consuming.

This is one of those things which I presumed would be really simple but when it came to it, having never actually tried it before, turns out to be a pain ...

R