Planet CakePHP

Hi, can anyone tell me, how to retrieve joined result from multiple tables in cakePHP ( using cakePHP mvc architecture). For example, I have three tables to join (tbl_topics, tbl_items, tbl_votes. Their relationship is defined as following: a topic can have many items and an item can have many votes. Now I want to retrieve a list of topics with the count of all votes on all items for each topic. The SQL query for this is written below:

SELECT Topic.*, count(Vote.id) voteCount 
FROM 
tbl_topics AS Topic 
LEFT OUTER JOIN tbl_items AS Item 
ON (Topic.id = Item.topic_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN tbl_votes AS Vote
ON (Item.id = Vote.item_id); 

My problem is I can do it easily using $this->->query function, but this requires sql code to be written in the controller which I don't want. I'm trying to find out any other way to do this (like find()).