Flat Design Birthday Cake: Illustrator Tutorial

Another illustration from my spree of doing illustrator tutorials which look interesting to me.
This tutorial taught me how to use the paintbrush tool which was used for the icing, including changing the smoothing up to make the curves nicer. It also used the align distribute tool for the lines on the candle. This also used more of the shape builder tool. For the shadow on the right the cake was duplicated, a rectangle drawn over half of it, and the shape builder tool used to remove half. Then the multiply mode was applied. The outside shadow was applied using a gradient, and using a duplicate of the circle as a clipping mask. The repetition of some of these work flows is really cementing my knowledge. I'm going to do a few more, and tackle some original concepts.