I hate chocolate mousse. I just can't seem to get this right.

It seems recently I've accumulated several recipes I just couldn't make right, but with enough help and second opinions I've been able to figure out the problem and master technique. For awhile my mayo would always break when made in the food processor, even though I could make it perfectly well by hand. The problem was I was trying to do too much at once in the small machine and the emulsion would break. And then there was the time I wasted 7# of butter trying to figure out why I couldn't make pate a choux (similar problem of overloading a small machine).

This thing with the mousse, though, has me stumped. The technique is to basically cook the egg yolks with hot sugar syrup (like an Italian meringue), then fold in melted chocolate thoroughly, then add a batch of whipped cream. The problem is when I add the cream, it makes the chocolate seize which results in tiny chunks of solidified chocolate, rather than creating a perfectly smooth, chunk-free mousse.

Dan has said the chocolate can't be too hot, just below body temp (or at least that's my recollection), which I've done faithfully, but the problem still exists. I've tried all sorts of things, but it seems to me that the way to solve this is to make sure the melted chocolate is COMPLETELY mixed into the yolks before adding the cream. Unfortunately, this really runs the risk of deflating the yolks too much and losing all the desired volume. Another way to solve this problem (untested by me, though) is to not incorporate fully-whipped, super-cold cream, but to whip the cream only to soft peaks and don't let it get too cold.

This recipe hates me.

POSTSCRIPT: I just did a little online research which yielded that chocolate slightly WARMER than body temp is best, as well as whipping the mousse to soft peaks only, as I suspected. Several web sites confirm.