iPhone UILabel text soft shadow

Question

I know soft shadows are not supported by the UILabel out of the box, on the iPhone. So what would be the best way to implement my own one?

EDIT:

Obviously I will subclass the UILabel and draw in the -drawRect: My question is, how do I get the contents of the label as graphics and draw around them, blur them etc...

EDIT 2:

I returned to this question about a year later. In the meantime I've built a class that allows you to easily add soft shadow to a label and tweak it's radius etc and also to draw gradients on the text itself. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/doukasd/iOS-Components/tree/master/Views

Answer 1

This answer to this similar question provides code for drawing a blurred shadow behind a UILabel. The author uses CGContextSetShadow() to generate the shadow for the drawn text.