Nostalgic birthday cake, maple spice with caramel icing

It's my lovely husband's birthday tomorrow and he's requested a particular cake that his mother used to bake, nearly 30 years ago.  All he could remember was that it had fudge icing and was in a ring tin.  So, problem number one, locate a ring tin.  A quick text message (ah, the wonders of modern technology) to a half-dozen friends was successful.  Next step, call his Mum and see if she knew what he meant, and more importantly, could locate the recipe.  His dad answered the phone and knew exactly the one I meant (spooky) and his Mum knew it too, and sent the recipe along a day later. 

Twenty-odd years ago, they lived in Melbourne too, so this was another Australian recipe, full of cups and teaspoons and so forth.  While baking, I converted the cups of flour, butter etc to British metric measurements in case I wanted to make the recipe again.  The recipe required liquid coffee, but he didn't want that so asked for maple syrup instead. 

I'm gonna assume that the recipe slightly didn't work (it hasn't been tasted yet) because it's old and I used a different ingredient.  After the required bake time, it resembled jelly, seriously, so I gave it 5 more mins. Here's what came out...

Or does this look more appetising??

As if that wasn't bad enough, the caramel frosting was equally difficult to get right.  Far too few instructions in the method meant using Google to figure out what on earth I should do.  I mean, does this look like it will ever be solid enough to paste over a cake?

But finally it was, hooray.

And we have the final result, ta da.  I have to assume you lot think it looks good because I've had positive feedback on Facebook and requests for the recipe too, thanks for your support!