CakePHP save without form

I have a photo gallery I'm trying to set a picture as the cover for the album. I have a field cover_id in the albums table that has already been linked to the photos through the model. I'm passing the album_id and photo_id to the controller. I want to update the album.cover_id passed thru the params with the photo_id passed thru the params. Is there a way to do this or a way to make the link a form without having it look like or form or changing much of the CSS?