featured blogs on homepage last update date

On the home page of my WPMU site (personal site) I have say 9 featured blogs from the entire system. It will alway be these 9 blogs. I want to display the date of the last post from each of the featured blogs on the index.

How can this be done? The blogs are not set to public as I don't want them to be public as far as search engines etc. Is there code that will query the database directly for the blog ID's that I chose?

Thanks for any help