+1 carving and scraping. That's what I did on the Townsend highboy I built. I broke the profile down into three separate parts and made a scraper for each. A trick that Al Breed taught me was to make the straight side returns first, then mark the mitered blank directly from the completed return. This is especially important if the curved molding is not parallel to the floor when it miters with the return, as the profile on the curved molding will be slightly different than the return. This was the case on the highboy I did, and this tip made all the difference.
Rob