The appearance of double consonants (kr-) at the beginning of the word immediately reveals to us that this must be a loan word. No Finno-Ugric word starts with two consonants. It is always just one, followed by a vowel or two. It’s not difficult to find out either where the word has been borrowed from: all the fancy things used to come to us from Baltic Germans.
The web page of the Estonian Language Institute hosts a separate dictionary of German loan words in Estonian and provides us more answers. The first appearance of the word kringel in written Estonian dates back to 1660, used by pastor Heinrich Göseken, in his book Manuductio ad linguam Oesthonicam (Handbook for the Estonian Language, digitally available through the Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum). It’s described as a sweet, twisted bun. The word can be encountered in the oldest Estonian written sources. Swedes and Latvians know the word, too. It has been borrowed and used in all of these languages and dialects from Lower Middle German quite a while ago.
