CakePHP Bake with Cygwin on Windows 7

I've been working with CakePHP for a few weeks now and I really enjoy it. I skipped over the Bake Console figuring that I'd learn more if I wrote everything by hand. Now I'd like to actually use this tool so I setup an alias in my Cygwin profile but every time I type cake bake it just hangs. I can't even use task manager to exit out of the Cygwin process.

I added alias cake="C:/xampp/php/php.exe; C:/xampp/htdocs/cake_1_2/cake/console/cake.bat" to the Cygwin .profile and also added C:\xampp\php; C:\xamp\htdocs\cake_1_2\cake\console to my environment path.

Any guidance or anecdotal experience would be helpful. Thanks.