Well, I have done some more searching and have come to the conclusion that I probably was trying too hard (guess thats better than the opposite).
Unit testing a controller class completely independant of any other elements is somewhat unrealistic, due to the problems I encountered due to not being able to substitute in mock objects. It seems it is acceptable to perform what I would consider integration testing on a controller instead. For models (and probably views) the independant level of testing is possible.
I still haven't found many resources on how to go about it, but there is a
discussion on Nabble that covers it pretty well, as well as
this article by Alexander Netkachev.