Per Nathalie e Mariana

Both my friends Nathalie and Mariana asked me to put on line the recipe of
Bunet that I made for them in different occasions. So, here it is!
As a note: Bunet is a tipical Piemontese dessert, and bunet is a tipical Piemontese dialect word. Not sure what it means exactly. The main difference between a bunet and a regular budino (pudding) is that it contains amaretti. There are very aery cookies made of almonds.

Bunet (or Bonet)
(Nathalie, merci bien pour les roses!!! :) :) :) )

Ingredients
4 eggs
30 amaretti cookies
1/2 liter milk
6 tbsps sugar (+2 for the pan)
5 tbsps unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup espresso coffee
1/4 cup rum

Soak the amaretti in the milk. Separate the yolks from the whites. With a mixer, mix the yolks, the sugar, the cocoa, then the coffee and the rum. Then add this to the mixture of milk and cookies. Beat the eggwhites until firm (add a tiny amount of salt to help this). Gently fold the eggwhites in the rest of the liquid mixture.
Caramellize 2 spoons of sugar on the bottom of the baking pan (use the same you would use for bread loaves). Pour the mixture on top of the caramellized sugar in the pan. Put this inside a larger pan that you will have filled with hot water (at a level such that it arrives at about 3/4 of the height of the baking pan with the liquid mixture inside). Put this sort of 'double pan' in the oven that must be preheated at 400 F, for 40 minutes. This procedure of cooking would be called 'a bagno Maria' in Italian, which means 'in the Maria bathing way' :) :)
Let it cool in the fridge overnight. When ready, pass a knife along the borders of the pan so that the bunet detaches from the pan, then flip it on a dish. It should fall out of the pan very easily. Serve cold.
If it's well cooked, all the ingredients must have separated and created layers of different colors: on the bottom (ie on the top, while you're baking) there are the cookies, then layers of chocolate/milk, coffee and rum - not sure about which one is which.
But anyway, if you obtain somehting like this, you're good:
I like this dessert very much. It's really difficult to repeat the same result. Each time I get layers of different color and thickness.. but it's usually good, although not always as pretty as the one in the picture. A possible variation is to remove the coffee and put more rum, if you don't like the coffee taste very much.
This recipe was given to me by the Real and Only Bunet Master: zia Carla!!
Grazie mille, zia :)