I am new to cakephp and I'm trying to accomplish something that should be relatively easy. I have 2 models projects & categories bind by HABTM relationship. I am trying to perform the following query - find all projects that belong to a category $projects = $this->Project->find('all', array('conditions' => array('Category.slug' => $category))); However when I'm doing so it generates an SQL error: SQL Error: 1054: Unknown column 'Category.slug' in 'where clause' What am I doing wrong??