http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-recent-posts-widget/
Advanced Recent Posts Widget is a light widget advanced version of the WordPress Recent Posts widget allowing increased customization to display recent posts from multiple categories or from custom post types.
Features:
- Display post thumbnails, with customizable size and automatic resizing using timthumb script.
- Display post excerpt, date, comment count, and more.
- Provides option to: ***show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be. ***show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be. ***show the post date. ***show read more link ***show the comment count. ***override the post order to order by; date, title, random, comment count etc. ***select multiple categories ***select custom post type
- Multiple widgets.