The good people in the Laravel forum answered this one for me http://laravel.io/forum/02-10-2014-laravel-4-confused-about-how-to-use-appmake
Pretty much if you can bind custom instantiation code with App::bind(); like so
App::bind('My\NewClass', function() use ($classArgs) {
return new My\NewClass($classArgs['id'], $classArgs['title']);
});
// get the binding
$newClass = App::make('My\NewClass');