Widget to feature posts in sidebar?

I’m practically tearing my hair out in frustration after hours of searching for a plugin to do this right … surely there has to be one out there!? What I need:

My client wants to select specific posts to be “featured” in the sidebar. I can’t use the WordPress “sticky post” feature for this because I am already using that to have a separate set of featured posts on the homepage. (I know, right…)

I am looking for some kind of widget to show a list of all of the blog posts, and select a certain number of them to feature. (Seems like most of the widgets out there only show the most recent posts, or posts from a specific category. I need to just choose specific posts.)

I also need to be able to customize the output of the posts in the sidebar so that they show the title, custom excerpt, featured image, category, and number of comments. I can try to hack the plugin to do this if it’s relatively simple … but I’m not a plugin developer. Really, if it just spat out the post IDs so I could make a custom query out of it in my sidebar template, that would work wonders.

Please help, any suggestions would be wonderful! So far, the Super Widgets plugin is the closest to what I need. I like how the posts are selected within the widget. But I wasn’t able to decode the back-end enough to customize the output.