gistfile1.txt

Not sure about phpunit's mock building, but with mockery you could possibly mock
the Article class - not the entire class, but just the createQueryBuilder method,
which you set that to return a mock of the query builder, on which you further 
set the expectations. Something like:

<?php
use \Mockery as m;
function testQueryBuilder()
{
  $qbMock = m::mock(...QueryBuilderClassGoesHere...);
  $qbMock->shouldReceive("andWhere")
          ->with("a.publishDate IS NOT NULL")
          ->andReturn($qbMock);
  // ... rest of the expectations ...

  $article = m::mock("Article[createQueryBuilder]");
  $article->shouldReceive("createQueryBuilder")
          ->with('a')
          ->andReturn($qbMock);

  $article->findRecent(1);
}