Problems rendering tilestache served mbtiles in QGIS

I came across Geoffery Hing’s walk through on using Tilestache to serve up mbtiles to QGIS. I followed the configuration and I was able to view tiles in the browser without any problems. However, when I try to load the XML in QGIS, all I get is an image that looks roughly like scrambled cable from the days of yore:

My tilestache.xml is as follows:

<GDAL_WMS>
    <Service name="TMS">
        <ServerUrl>http://127.0.0.1:8080/${z}/${x}/${y}.png</ServerUrl>
    </Service>
    <DataWindow>
        <UpperLeftX>-73.009</UpperLeftX>
        <UpperLeftY>41.3578</UpperLeftY>
        <LowerRightX>-72.8394</LowerRightX>
        <LowerRightY>41.2355</LowerRightY>
        <TileLevel>13</TileLevel>
        <TileCountX>1</TileCountX>
        <TileCountY>1</TileCountY>
        <YOrigin>top</YOrigin>
    </DataWindow>
    <Projection>EPSG:900913</Projection>
    <BlockSizeX>256</BlockSizeX>
    <BlockSizeY>256</BlockSizeY>
    <BandsCount>3</BandsCount>
    <Cache />
</GDAL_WMS>

I have a hunch that this is a problem with tilestache and perhaps its dependencies. GDAL is version 1.9, which should be sufficient. I have no problem loading tiles from openstreet map using this XML.

<GDAL_WMS>
    <Service name="TMS">
        <ServerUrl>http://tile.openstreetmap.org/${z}/${x}/${y}.png</ServerUrl>
    </Service>
    <DataWindow>
        <UpperLeftX>-20037508.34</UpperLeftX>
        <UpperLeftY>20037508.34</UpperLeftY>
        <LowerRightX>20037508.34</LowerRightX>
        <LowerRightY>-20037508.34</LowerRightY>
        <TileLevel>18</TileLevel>
        <TileCountX>1</TileCountX>
        <TileCountY>1</TileCountY>
        <YOrigin>top</YOrigin>
    </DataWindow>
    <Projection>EPSG:900913</Projection>
    <BlockSizeX>256</BlockSizeX>
    <BlockSizeY>256</BlockSizeY>
    <BandsCount>3</BandsCount>
    <Cache />
</GDAL_WMS>

When I run gdalinfo on the mbtiles, I get an error saying that they are not a recognized file format. I suspect this is at the root of my problem, but I am at a loss as to how to fix this.