Saving multiple rows of key-value pairs during a single update?

Well my last question here turned out to be between keyboard and
chair, so hopefully this isn't quite as silly a question!

I am learning Cake and building a custom user authentication system
(who isn't?). I am trying to use two separate tables to store data,
the User Model table as parent which stores only mission critical data
(login, password, email, created, etc), and a MetaUser model table
which is built around key value pairs (meta_id, user_id, meta_key,
meta_value).

Upon registration I have two pieces of meta information I would like
to store - the activation code and an optin for receiving
communication from site admins. I have built the forms as instructed
by the Cake Book in order to use saveAll() in my Register action. The
problem is that this results in the following array:

Array
(
[MetaUser] => Array
(
[optin] => 1
[activation_code] => 9c1a26272907d4196a7bf39d
[user_id] => 17
)
)

This obviously won't save since there is no optin or activation_code
column in the MetaUser table. So I tried creating a beforeSave() under
the presumption that if this was a numerical array it might try and
add multiple rows on its own;

public function beforeSave() {

if ( isset( $this->data['MetaUser']['user_id'] ) ) {

$userid = $this->data['MetaUser']['user_id'];

$new = array();
$i = 0;

foreach ( $this->data['MetaUser'] as $k => $v ) {
$new[$i]['user_id'] = $user_id;
$new[$i]['meta_key'] = $k;
$new[$i]['meta_value'] = $v;
$i++;
}

$this->data['MetaUser'] = $new;

}

return true;

}

But apparently it doesn't work that way. I'm going to try it next
using distinct save()'s for $this->User and $this->MetaUser but am I
missing something else that I should be doing instead? I want to
create a MetaUser model where I can save each entry (even if multiple
are coming from one form) as separate rows based on the key => value
pair setup.

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