After a fair while developing soley in C#.net, I decided it was time for a change. CakePHP looks like a very solid framework and I decided to give it a whirl with MAMP. Everything was going fine, but I could not get Cake to connect to the MAMP installed instance of MySql. After a bit of googling, I found this helpful post that resolved the problem.
To summarize, MAMP installs mysqld with the following option: --socket=/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock but everything else on the system looks for /tmp/mysql.sock.
The soloution is to make a symbolic link to the latter via the terminal with the command: sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
Thanks to Stefan Fischerländer for his post.