How do I recover an iPhoto album using TimeMachine?

Can I use TimeMachine to recover the photos removed from an iPhoto album? Here's the scenario:

Wife: Honey, choose 5 photos out of the album of 125 that we can use for an album cover.

Me: Sure thing. :: starts deleting photos from the album ::

::: next day :::

Wife: Did you choose the 5 photos?

Me: Yes!

Wife: (after looking at the computer) But where are all the other photos in the album??

And scene. That's right, after all her hard work, I deleted most of the 'wedding album' that we're supposed to give to the photographer. After trying a few Cmd+Z actions to undo my deleting from the previous day, I was still 100 photos short of a full album. So then I tried launching Time Machine, going back to the previous day and bingo, the album had the correct 125 pictures! When I selected them all and chose 'Restore', it attempted to reimport the photos. But after it was done, the iPhoto album remained with the same 25 photos. Alternatively I tried lauching Time Machine and then select just the album but still the same result.

I realize that albums are simply a set of short-link photos to the library. But is there really no way to revive the contents of an album in iPhoto using TimeMachine without doing a full restore of the iPhoto Library?

As a last ditch effort I tried going into the iPhoto Library folder and restoring just the AlbumData.xml file in TimeMachine. However when I launched TimeMachine there was no way to navigate into the iPhoto Library folder itself. TimeMachine seems to treat the iPhoto Library folder as a single item (with good reason, as I can imagine).

MacOS: 10.6.8

iPhoto: 9.2.1