Showing products in a specific category

{{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="10"}} 

where 10 is your featured category id.

If you are going to use in a phtml file you can use magento object to filter

$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load(10); 
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product') ->getCollection() ->addCategoryFilter($category); 
print_r($product);