What I ended up doing was getting the template cache and putting the view in there. I don't have control over not using ngMock, it turns out:
beforeEach(inject(function (_$rootScope_, _$compile_, $templateCache) {
scope$scope = _$rootScope_;
$compile = _$compile_;
$templateCache.put('path/to/template.html', '.<template-'<div>Here goes-here the template</>'div>');
}));