Chris Hartjes has posted some custom queries that showcase the CakePHP framework's paginaton capabilities:

Okay, so it turns out that the paginate() method that is used to generate the data that you (oddly enough) paginate through takes the same arguments as Model::findAll(). So, if you want to use your own query, you simply create a 'paginate' method for your model.

His queries show the two parts of the equation - fetching the paginated results themselves and grabbing what the current page number is (like "page 7 of 23").