Cakephp 3: Hydrating nested entities in query results - cakephp-3.0

Question

Just to level-set:
CakePHP 3 introduces Entity objects which can represent an ORM (database) record as an object rather than an array. Creating the object from the raw data is called "hydration". This has pros and cons, depending on what you're trying to achieve, so CakePHP gives you the option to control hydration through the hydrate() function which can be chained in the query.
What I've observed is only the top level results are hydrated; nested results are not. So if my query is something like:
$authors=$this->Authors->find("all")->contain("Books");
$this->set("authors",$authors);
will return something along the lines of
authors (array) << This is an array since we can have multiple records
0 (object) <<< This is the Entity object representing the first Author
id 1
name "Roger Kaplan"
[other author fields]
books (array) <<< This is an array because there are multiple books
0 (array) <<< I expect this to be an entity object!!
id 100
title "CakePHP Made Easy"
[other book fields]
1 (array) <<< I want this to be an entity too
id 101
title "Solving Java-induced Neuroses"
[other book fields]
Is it possible to have the nested entities hydrated as well?
The reason I'm asking is that I'm building helpers which expect an entity object to be passed, and uses the metadata on the entity object to do interesting things. I want to be able to pass nested records as well as top-level ones.
EDIT:
Something I just noticed is that belongsTo associations, which will only contain one record, will be inserted as an array of values (ie not an entity) while hasMany associations will return an array of entities. Here is the dump from my actual project; I've attempted to edit it down for clarity:
$message = $this->Messages->find("all")->where(["Messages.id" => $message_id])->contain(["MessageBodies","JobOrders","Candidates"])->first();
Messages belongsTo Candidates and JobOrders, and hasMany MessageBodies.
Here is a rendering of the result:
message(array)
id 1
job_order_id 2
candidate_id 1
candidate(array)
id 1
first_name Roger
last_name Kaplan
job_order(array)
id 2
name Chief Cook and Bottle Washer
message_bodies(array)
0(object)
1(object)
2(object)
So if my assumption is correct, that only hasMany associations are returned as an array of entities, the question is, how can I get belongsTo (and possibly hasOne, which I tend not to use) contained data to show up as Entity's?

Answer 1

The data passed into the view does indeed contain nested entities, as verified by the debugger. I was using the variable viewer in the Cake toolbar to look into the structure, and that view was reporting the embedded entities as arrays. Based on that data, I was reaching into the structure with ["array syntax"] but the Cake entity is smart enough to intercept that and convert to get() calls.