Featured post not showing up on homepage

Hi, I am trying to add featured posts on the homepage of my website. The steps that I am going through are: Appearance - customize - theme options - homepage/frontpage - select categories - enable latest posts on static frontpage. I have made a category as 'featured' in the Posts section and have selected that as the category in the above steps. But I am seeing all the posts instead of just the ones under that category on the homepage. I tried using the Essential Content Plugin as well. I created the same post in the Featured content section of the plugin but can't figure out a way to display posts through this plugin. Please let me know any suggestions to fix this issue. Thanks!