Standalone Mocking In .Net 4.0 MVC?

I'm trying to unit test the logOn method of my .Net 4.0 MVC application. I'm pretty sure I need to mock a bunch of objects because I don't want to hit the actual database and I only want to simulate an HTTPcontext in a limited and specific way (if I have to do it at all). All the examples I've found online use mocking frameworks like Moq, RinoMocks or nMock. MVC is all about Test Driven Development, there must be some way to do simple tests without using third party software.

The specific problem,The basic problem is that the controller I'm testing calls Response.Cookies.Add(...) but since the unit test is not in an HTTPContext, Response is null and I get an exception.

My research so far,I understand there is a layer of abstraction which will help me somehow. For example HttpResponse inherits from HttpResponseBase. I think I'm supposed to make a class that inherits from one of the MVC base classes, overload some of the members and then
call the method I want to test in a way that gives it my object instead of one it would normally use.

The question is how to do that. One would need to set up existing code with the ability to construct future versions of objects. Intuitively however, it would seem that existing code could only be and use functionality that existed at the time it was written.
Fortunately, a dynamic runtime means that the code which is actually run can be determined things that change after it is written like config files and HTTP headers.

One way to do that is for the existing code to use some method typically referred to as a factory that takes a string and returns an instance of an object.I conclude that I should look through the code for this factory and figure out how to manipulate it.

My background,I've recently graduated with a degree in Computer Science. Now at my new job, I've been assigned to write unit tests for a large project. Admittedly, I'm new to MVC, many aspects of C# and large projects in general. I may have made simple mistakes or incorrect assumptions in my analysis of this problem. I will do my best to stay active on this post and make it useful for others in situations similar to mine.