Kuih Cincin is a traditional ring-shaped cookie from the Bajau and Brunei Malay communities in Sabah and Brunei. If you have never seen it before, imagine a small dark-brown ring that looks a bit like a miniature doughnut, except it is bone-dry, rock-hard and crunchy all the way through. It is made from rice flour and gula apong (palm sugar), which gives it that deep caramel flavour, and it is deep-fried twice in the traditional Sabah hawker version to get that shattering crunch. At 120 calories per piece, the main culprit is the frying oil, which accounts for about 34 of those calories on its own. It is not a diet food, and nobody is pretending it is. But because it is so dense and hard, you actually chew it slowly and tend to eat fewer pieces than you think. Fair warning though: these numbers are a genuine ballpark estimate because hard nutritional data for Kuih Cincin is basically nonexistent, so treat the figures as a reasonable guide rather than gospel.
What actually moves the maths is how many you grab. One piece is 120 calories, which is manageable. Three pieces is 360 calories, which is already a medium-sized meal in cookie form. The double-fried Sabah hawker version clocks in slightly higher at around 125 calories per piece versus the softer single-fried Brunei-Malay version at about 110 calories, because more frying means more oil absorbed. If you are buying these from a stall or pasar malam, they almost always come in packs of 10 to 20 pieces, and that is where it gets dangerous. Nobody stops at two. If you portion yourself to five pieces, you are looking at 600 calories from snacks alone, which is a lot for something that does not fill you up the same way real food does. Eat them as an occasional treat, not a bag-a-day habit.